


The Hunt

by WithLoweredVoices



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: AU, Everyone's an adult, M/M, Seelie/Unseelie AU, no explicit sexual content right now, this may change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2018-11-05 20:27:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 60,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11020974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WithLoweredVoices/pseuds/WithLoweredVoices
Summary: Because Tsukishima is Unseelie.And the man with the wind-wild hair and the face of a beautiful demon is Seelie.So Tsukishima throws his money on the table and flees.--In which everyone is a fairy and I don't mean the glittery kind.





	1. Winter wind

 It arrives on the ice of a winter’s breeze, small and innocuous at first. It scatters empty potato chip packets and plastic bags, and nips at the ankles of unsuspecting tourists who don’t know that the city wind does not have teeth. By the time it reaches the dark alleyways, it has become something else, something capable of knocking over trash cans and sending stacks of newspapers flying in all directions. It claws its way into the sewers and marks the tunnels with scratchings that glow eerily in the dim light. When it resurfaces, it has taken ownership of all the old and forgotten things that have fallen into decay at the root of the city. It is hungry and wild and eager.

As it roars under the bridges and the trains,  the homeless wake from their restless slumber and huddle together closer by the fire. They know the wind has a name, even if the city has forgotten. 

It searches, searches, and howls in a tongue that it knows its servants will answer.

And its servants hear the howl-song.

In a small, warm apartment, soapy dishes crack as they land on the floor. A small-figured young man with fire-colored hair stares out into the darkness beyond the fire escape. He looks at the woman who was once his mother and is now crow to his cuckoo. He looks at the little girl who believes she is his sister. He is afraid for them. 

But he is of the place Under the Hill. He is  _ exhilarated.  _

A hooded figure freezes in an alleyway. The knives in his pockets sharpen suddenly for the first time in years. He smiles grimly. He looks up through the fire escape, through the window, at a young man with fire-colored hair. The redhead returns his smile. There is a vicious turn to it, a greedy, hungry curve that shows teeth too sharp.

And elsewhere, elsewhere, in places dark and in places light, the members of the Court Under the Hill stop and listen. The Hunt has arrived.

In a boisterous bar, with the television blaring the baseball game, Tsukishima clenches his hand around the half-empty glass of whiskey-coke. He cannot taste the sweet-smoke taste in his mouth anymore. He can only feel the faint iron wisp of blood. He heaves a sharp sigh and pinches at the bridge of his nose under his glasses. He does not want to listen: it is a pain, it is a goddamn fucking bear-trap on his delicate fairy ass-cheeks, and he hates the way everyone else drools and chases after the Hunt like a bunch of idiotic dogs. It’s just a stupid tradition, a stupid, pointless bloodless ritual to pretend that they are more than the constant losers of an endless war.

Tsukishima throws back the rest of his drink. He winces at the taste.

Or rather, the lack of taste.

He will not taste anything again until the Hunt is over.

Something glows, too-bright and too-beautiful, from across the bar. Tsukishima averts his attention to the source. 

A man is watching him with a sly grin that spreads further and further. But this man is not a man, in the way that the men screaming at the television and cheering on their favorite teams are men. This man is not a man in the way that the bartender is a man. Even beneath the careless fall of his jet-black hair, Tsukishima can see the feline slit of the man’s eyes. 

‘Fuck,’ Tsukishima utters under his breath. He gave himself away. He gave himself away.  _ He gave himself away in a human bar. _

The man’s grin widens. He lifts his tall pint of beer. The golden liquid sparkles effervescently, reflecting a light that is definitely not coming from the dull lights of the bar, and the foam froths over the brim of the glass and down onto the table. 

‘I’ve caught you, crow,’ the man mouths.

The glass snaps in Tsukishima’s hand. Ice and shards erupt everywhere. Suddenly he needs to run, out into the wind, into the gathering frost in the sky and away from this place because it is infected, infested with the enemy, and he should have been careful when he came in but now it is too late and he has gotten himself into shit so deep he might be tasting feces for the rest of his immortal life. 

Because Tsukishima is Unseelie.

And the man with the wind-wild hair and the face of a beautiful demon is Seelie.

So Tsukishima throws his money on the table and flees.

\----

Kenma has just about finished paying for the second drink at the bar when he notices the flash of black feathers darting out the front door. He looks down into the tall pint of beer and considers pouring it over his friend’s head. He humors himself with the image for a minute, then dismisses the fantasy. He knew this was going to happen when he left the house. Kuroo always always always picks a fucking fight.

And this time, he picks a fight with a Crow. A Shield-Crow, no less.

_ One drink,  _ Kuroo said.  _ One harmless drink. _

Bull-fucking-shit. Kuroo never ventures into the human world without an agenda.

Kenma doesn’t drink, of course, but he had no choice in coming to this particular bar on this particular night. Kenma never gets a choice. He makes his choice, and then Kuroo informs him it was the wrong choice and gets his way anyways. 

When he had politely ignored the pixies chasing him on the way to school,  _ no, I’m not going into the woods, thank you, I think I’m just going to go to school and study, no I don’t want to frolic naked amongst my peoples _ , Kuroo had materialized at his school and dragged him to the Court.

When he had ignored the Queen’s welcome and calmly informed them that he quite liked being human, thanks for that, Kuroo had followed him  _ home, his  _ human home where his human parents lived, and stood there with a goddamn boombox until Kenma gave in.

When Kenma refused to attend the Troop, Kuroo dragged him there with promises of pretty new games to load on his pretty new human toys. Kuroo had showed him how to play pretty new games on the Unseelie, how to outwit their every wild move, how to read the Hunt in their eyes, how to win. 

Kenma likes to win, but he likes to win carefully, slowly, patiently. Kuroo sticks his hands in the fire and acts satisfied when it burns.

Kenma sets the beer in front of Kuroo.

‘You’re an idiot,’ he informs his childhood friend. ‘And an asshole.’

‘An offence is the best defence,’ is the quick reply. ‘That’s what the humans say, isn’t it?’

Kenma clicks his tongue and looks up at the ceiling. ‘You’re stupid. This is stupid,’ he sighs. ‘He wasn’t a threat. You should have been watching out for Hinata.’ 

The dark-haired man taps the edge of the glass. The beer hums with a sudden influx of mead and pixie-honey, and it shimmers obnoxiously. ‘Oh,’ he grins teasingly, ‘that  _ changeling  _ you like to meet in the human park on Sundays? The redhead with the weird, shapeshifting thingy, power, I mean? Isn’t he a Pooka? We’ve killed enough of those donkey-eared mutts in our day.’

Kenma sighs. ‘You’ll see,’ he says, more tiredly than cryptically. 

Whatever retort Kuroo manages, Kenma is no longer listening.

Instead, he thinks of a playground, looping red-painted bars emerging from the rubbery ground like iron ferns. He remembers the way that the leaves dragged over the floor, the way they hit the backs of his legs and turned to heavy gold. He can still smell the way his skin burned when he touched the climbing frame, the way he cried and cried and cried and even when he told his mother what happened she thought he was delirious. He remembers learning how to stay away from playgrounds, after that.

It became hard to be human after that, at least in the way he used to be. He saw the way cats unfold out of their fur coats and grow grey-matted hands and beady non-animal eyes. He saw the way that little darting insects sometimes forget to be insects and grow even more limbs. He stopped talking like a seven-year old, because then he already knew that he was seven before his fae-mother broke his bones and shrunk him into the shape of a dead human child. When his friends talked about babies in cabbage patches and kissing parents and lovely things like Santa and the Tooth Fairy, he looked down into his gameboy instead. He didn’t want the world of Fair Folk and he could no longer grip the slippery strands of Boy and Human and Normal and Does Not Scream When He Touches The Car Door.

So Kenma learned how to live in a world that was outside of Fae and Human. And that was fine, it was fine, play games and look at things that exist in a nowhere world made of numbers and code. Get by. Forget what it was like to look at the trees turn from emerald to amber and crimson. Forget that gold-light that grows, somewhere above the lungs but under the ribs. 

When he first watched Kuroo wrapping himself around a troll, Kenma felt the death in his ribs spread further.

He remembers wishing, using magic of the Court of Red Leaves, splattering his blood on the fresh-fallen leaves and calling for a someone to be his someone, his own someone. His real someone, someone who made him feel the way he felt when he was six and he looked up at the red-amber trees, before he touched the iron bars and burned his palms.

And then, in the turn of spring, he arrives.

The Crow with hair like the trees, aflame with Fall.

Now, Kenma watches Kuroo grow drunk and insult a human at the bar. They argue and pummel at each other and Kuroo gifts the man with a pocket full of gold, even though neither Kenma nor Kuroo are leprechauns, and then Kenma supports him the whole way back to his apartment. He even manages a smile at Kuroo before he heads back into the winter night.

Kenma hears the call of the Hunt rise on the biting wind. He pulls his jacket collar up around his neck and zips the jacket up tighter. He wonders if this will hurt Hinata, the way it hurts him. 

He pulls out his phone and traces his thumb over the words he wishes he could say. He says none of these things, and instead puts his phone away in his pocket and heads home, to his human mother, and lie to her about where he is about to go for a full month. 

Kenma does not think about his sword, or the way he will have to place his sword against Hinata’s neck, and the way the trees are always empty and silent in winter, and the brown muck of rotten leaves no longer aflame with Fall.


	2. An attempted murder of Crows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was only expecting one of the two, not the dynamic duo, freak sundae-special combo, two-in-one, buy one headache get one free eye-twitching session.

Hinata opens the door before Kageyama’s fist can even hit the wooden panel. For a moment, Kageyama’s face furrows with a frown, but then he sighs, rolls his eyes, and steps into Hinata’s apartment. He pulls off his hoodie and hangs it up on a hook as though it’s a coat and not just an ordinary hoodie that he literally could have just slung over the back of a chair. Kageyama wasn’t raised a human, like Hinata was, so he still thinks it would be rude to bring a hooded jacket into the living space.

Any other day, Hinata would have made fun of Kageyama’s total lack of human etiquette. But not today. Today the howl-song calls to them and now they are both on edge, a hungry, anxious edge.

‘Kei texted me,’ Kageyama says, lowering his voice. He glances towards the living room, where Hinata’s mother is playing cards with his sister. They spot him in the doorway. Hinata’s mother waves quickly, flashing him a bright smile. Neither mother nor daughter know Kageyama’s true nature.

He knows that Hinata is very careful around his human family. Not every changeling cares, and some of them even delight in torturing their human hosts, but Hinata loves his human family and would probably rip Kageyama into shreds if he ever tried to hurt them. And Hinata is very good at ripping people to shreds. He looks adorable, all red hair and bright smiles and a loud, enthusiastic smile, more Seelie than Unseelie, but when he is on the hunt he is terrifying.

Efficient.

Ruthless.

Kageyama watched Hinata kill for the first time in the summer. There was a freak cold patch, and they were arguing about attack formations as they walked from coffee shop to bar. Some human had thought it a good idea to mug two seemingly helpless university students, waving his gun (iron bullets) and swearing loudly. Hinata had struck so quickly Kageyama almost didn’t send out a loop of his magic in time.

In the end, there was so much blood on the walls of the pedestrian subway tunnel that even Kageyama’s magic couldn’t clean it.

To stand in the Court Under the Hill is to know darkness. True darkness, like a winter’s night where the clouds and the moon are all swallowed by the clouds, and the snow muffles all sound. It is to become something other than oneself. It is to be the hungry soul of the Hunt, to be its teeth and its claws and its gleaming metal slashing and feeding. To stand in the Court Under the Hill is to step out of the light, away from everything that is known, and become Unknown.

The humans have stories about the Unseelie. There are older stories, too, stories that have been ignored or forgotten, where even ghosts are less frightening than the exploits of the Fair Folk.

Some are born into the Court, like Hinata, and Tsukishima. Hinata is a changeling, so his predatory has never known the bluntness of control. He fell into his powers. He still cannot control himself fully without Kageyama’s help. And Tsukishima, well, his natural form is frightening enough without the glamor to fade away the too-gold shine of his eyes or the way his teeth are all pointed or the fact that most spells bounce right off his skin.

Some are not born into the Court, but they step into it.

Kageyama was born of no court with no masters or Queens to swear fealty to. His kind, the human-born with fairy blood, belong neither to the human world nor to the Courts. They have been called witches, wisemen, shamans, wizards, mages, _freaks_ , _monsters, demons_. They have been burned and hanged and whipped and murdered by humans. And they have been made slaves by the Fair Folk. But still, a bloodling desires to belong. So Kageyama looked towards the Spring and Summer Courts for a place to belong. He laid his staff in front of their Queens and their Kings, borne the jeers and laughter of the pixies and elves and trolls. They laughed at him.

_No one shall want for a mage with such reckless spells. Do you think you could ever Pair with one of Us? You would murder them with your stupidity. Stupid human. Stupid half-breed. No one can use your tainted magic. You’re better off dead._

_You’re better off human._

He didn’t even bother with the Seelie Court. They would have murdered him just to teach other mages a lesson. So Kageyama tried to live in the human world, but with no money, no home, no place to belong, he starved. It was then, in the dead of winter, after living off scraps in alleyways for months, that the knights of the Winter Court found him.

He is not pledged to the Queen of the Winter Court. He is not Unseelie. He does not belong to anyone.

But he is of the Hunt, and he is Hinata’s Pair, and that is enough to make him loyal to everyone else who is loyal to Hinata. He would probably kill for Hinata, even though mages do not kill directly. He has never belonged anywhere. But now he does.

Now he does.

‘Tsukshima texted you?’ the redhead is asking, and Kageyama blinks away the past.

He pulls out his phone from his pocket and frowns deeply at the screen. ‘He says he accidentally revealed himself to a member of the Fall Court,’ Kageyama says.

To his surprise, Hinata smiles broadly and heads back into his living room. ‘Oh, I knew that already,’ he announces proudly. ‘Kenma told me.’

Kenma. The strange, small fairy with feline eyes and and an attitude as dull as drying paint. Kageyama has no idea why his Pair is so pleased to be friends with the enemy. This may be his first Hunt, but Kageyama knows the stories of how the Trooping Fairies completely strike down any fairy too greedy or too bloodthirsty. And Hinata is both, if the past year is anything to go by.

He decides to ignore the whole thing. ‘Tsukishima wants to meet,’ Kageyama continues, turning his phone screen towards Hinata so he can read the message himself. ‘He’s really freaking out. Look, he even used an emoji.’ He hovers his finger over the evidence.

‘An emoji,’ Hinata utters, nodding. ‘Wow.’ He knows that the tall, blonde-haired man barely even displays emotion in real life. When the rest of them run into the darkness howling for blood, Tsukishima just sort of strolls into the dark non-committedly, making scathing comments. ‘I guess we’d better take it seriously.’

‘At our usual place then?’ Kageyama asks, already typing.

‘Yeah, sure,’ Hinata nods. He calls over his shoulder for his mother. ‘We’re going out with the boys from the volleyball team!’

‘Oh, that’s lovely,’ his human mother says happily. ‘Say hello to everyone for me.’

When they are halfway down the stairs, Kageyama gives Hinata a murderous look. ‘Volleyball team?’

Hinata shrugs. ‘It’s the best I could come up with.’

Kageyama smacks him hard on the back of the head. ‘It’s fucking stupid. Could you seriously imagine me, playing volleyball?’ he demands, all incredulity and zero humor.

Hinata just laughs.

\---

Tsukishima’s mind races as he looks into his cup of coffee. He is usually better composed than this. He doesn’t care about the Hunt, or even about the supposed war between the Seelie and the Unseelie. He prides himself in his apathy. It allows him to sit above everyone else and observe them, tease them and irritate them, but never actually form anything solid enough to lose.

No one other than the Winter Court know about this cafe. There is a veil of glamor draped over the cafe, unbeknownst to its owner and its four baristas, keeping other humans out. The cafe staff never really question why they seemed to be serving coffee to the same group of handsome young men and beautiful women who never really seemed to age. The Fair Folk always tip well when the coffee is good, and the coffee is always good. Sometimes, of course, a few students from the local university stumble in, sick with stress-induced delirium, and huddle up next to the power sockets.

Tsukishima respects that sort of sacrifice for higher learning. If he could, he would definitely be in a human university lecture hall all day, learning all the wonderful things that humans did and discovered. Fairies never danced upon the moon. Humans do. They waltz in circles around the Earth in their metal chambers. They dig up the remains of enormous beasts that are older than even the Fair Folk. Ask a human how fire erupts from beneath the ground and they will tell you, simply and happily. Ask them what happened a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, and they will not paint a cryptic poem. Humans are fantastic.

Humans know how to care about larger, more fascinating things than a stupid tradition that requires full-grown men to go howling into the night. The Fair Folk were so fucking primitive.

Tsukishima smiles thinly. His internal rant makes short work of the last shreds of panic from the bar. He looks up in time to see Hinata and Kageyama walk into the cafe. His smile fades before it matures.

Hinata waves so enthusiastically it looks like his arm is going to pop out of its socket. Kageyama glowers at Tsukishima from over his shoulder.

Night and day. The freaky Pair. The dynamic duo.

One of his first acts in front of the Unseelie Queen was to duel the Pair. He had seen their freak attack up close, seen the way Kageyama’s almost ruthless loop of magic should have sliced clean through Hinata’s body. It was too sharp, too fast, too angry. But Hinata did not just let it hit him. He was already running _through_ the magic, letting it slice him up into a hundred tiny pieces as he leapt into it.  Then instead of fighting one fairy, Tsukishima was attacked by a horde of blood-eyed crows while Kageyama watched on, triumphant.

But that isn’t the worst of it. Without Kageyama, instead of crows, Hinata turns into a hundred small creatures worthy of a lovecraftian horror that suck the soul and happiness out of everything they touch. There are too many teeth and too many limbs and too many tentacles involved.

There is no way Tsukishima is allowing himself to witness that shit again. Not in this lifetime.

But no one can tell the sort of nightmarish horror Hinata produces, looking at his bright face and eager expression. He drops himself down into the armchair opposite Tsukishima, kicking his legs up in the air like a toddler as he settles into the cushioned chair. His cheeks are bright with the bite of the wind. It is always so striking to see just how small and boyish the changeling looks up close, with his eyes all squidged up from the effort of getting comfortable and his fingers digging into the arms of his chair. He orders a hot chocolate by shouting at the counter - ‘With marshmallows, please!’ - and grins so widely his eyes shut. Kageyama orders a coffee while he is still at the counter, nods once at the barista, and makes his way over to Tsukishima.

Hinata wiggles his hand at Kageyama. ‘Sit, sit,’ he orders.

‘Don’t order me around,’ the taller man snaps, and sits down at Hinata’s side anyways. He looks over at Tsukishima. ‘What spooked you?’

‘Always so crude!’ Hinata chides.

‘Straight to the point,’ Kageyama corrects, not bothering to look at his Pair. He tilts his head slightly. ‘So. Kei. What spooked you?’

Tsukishima clicks his tongue in irritation. ‘I was at the bar-’

‘Our bar? You went to our bar? Without the team? Without us? That’s not fair!’

‘Shut up, Hinata, let me talk,’ Tsukishima sighs. He feels a headache coming on.

He presses his fingertips against the bridge of his nose, but already his temples are throbbing. He was only expecting _one_ of the two, not the dynamic duo, freak sundae-special combo, two-in-one, buy one headache get one free eye-twitching session.

He tries again. ‘I was at the bar-’

‘Our bar,’ Kageyama interrupts.

Tsukishima smiles at him, baring his needle-sharp-teeth. ‘I will murder you if either of you interrupt me again,’ he remarks casually.

Hinata slaps at his Pair’s arm. ‘Yeah, Kageyama!’ he chides, his voice too loud. ‘Don’t interrupt!’

Tsukishima looks up at the ceiling and wonders why the fuck he even bothers, honestly, _why_. ‘I was at the bar, the fucking bar, who cares what bar, a bar, any fucking bar,’ he mutters to himself. ‘I heard the call of the Hunt and maybe I had a bit to drink already, and I reacted a little bit and one of the Seelie was there too at the opposite end of the bar and saw me and threatened me and now I’m pretty sure we’re all going to die.’

He squeezes his eyes shut and hopes they heard him, because he is not fucking saying any of that again. It was embarrassing.

‘Oh,’ Hinata’s voice sounds. ‘Oh I knew _that_.’ He laughs confidently. Because of-fucking-course the brat’s laugh is going to sound confident.

Tsukishima pries his eyes open and stares at Hinata.

‘Kenma,’ Kageyama pronounces, as though that is some sort of explanation. He nods firmly.

The two of them just are incapable of speaking any form of coherent language.

‘Kenma who?’ Tsukishima demands exasperatedly.

‘Kenma. He’s a Seelie changeling,’ the dark-haired man explains. He pushes his careless fringe out of his face briefly, his dark eyebrows flashing into view. Suddenly his frown is a million times more stark against the pale skin of his brow. ‘Hinata has been texting him and meeting up with him for months now. They get along well, and it’s not really forbidden in the rules of our Court, since technically the Unseelie Queen is still married to the Queen of the Seelie court.’ He shrugs, dropping his hands to his knees. The curtain of his hair sweeps back over his eerie black eyes.

‘So Hinata is dating a Seelie fairy,’ Tsukishima utters disbelievingly.

Hinata guffaws, slapping his knee. ‘Oh, we’re friends!’ he announces proudly. ‘Kenma is the best Pair! Apart from you, Kageyama,’ he adds reassuringly, leaning over to his Pair. ‘You’re a genius! But Kenma can Pair with everyone in the Seelie Court, and he is _sososososo_ good at strategizing. It’s like he’s telepathic, only he isn’t , and he’s so cool! And actually, lots of people in the Seelie Court are cool, but I haven’t met them. I want to fight them on the battlefield!’ Hinata’s chattering is a bombardment and Tsukishima’s shields have taken enough beating.

Hinata moves his hands around dangerously close to Tsukishima’s coffee, so Tsukishima moves his cup into his lap, where he clutches it protectively.

‘I’m sure I can take them all down,’ Hinata adds, seemingly oblivious of the coffee’s near-death experience. ‘I’m very good at disemboweling these days.’

‘It’s true,’ Kageyama confirms. He doesn’t smile, but his frown seems satisfied. ‘We have a very good routine now.’

Tsukishima stares at the two of them. His headache is now a full-blown migraine. .

‘You’re excited to disembowel your Seelie boyfriend,’ he summarizes. ‘Is that about right, Hinata?’

For this, Tsukishima receives a happy nod.

‘Okay,’ Tsukishima blinks. ‘I’ll think about that deeply, deeply disturbing fact another time. And what about the fairy who spotted me and threatened my life? Are you going to sing his praises too?’

‘His name is Kuroo and he is the leader of the Trooping Fairies,’ Hinata replies. ‘He’s Kenma’s best friend.’ He breaks out into an excited smile. ‘He’s really awesome too! Kenma says he’s amazing with a sword. Kenma is very good at judging people, did I tell you that already?’

‘Stop talking about him more than you talk about me,’ Kageyama complains loudly. His face is all crumpled, not so much with jealousy but more grumpy at being left out of the exclusive bubble that they usually exist in. ‘And it doesn’t matter how good the Seelie knights are. This year we will beat them, and we will open the gates of our Court again.’ His eyes flash with flinty determination. ‘We will claim our victory.’

There is nothing reassuring in Kageyama’s words, not for Tsukishima. He glances off to the left, out the slightly-steamed windows of the cafe, past the printed lettering and out at the deep dark sky above the slumbering city. Hinata and Kageyama are still arguing passionately about the cat-eyed fairy, but he ignores them. He looks at the snowflakes beginning to tumble down towards them. He recalls another time, another place, in the snow, and blood slashing a wide arc, melting down layers and layers of pure cotton-white. He remembers the sound of his own screaming.

He should probably admire Hinata and Kageyama for their ferociousness. They are true beasts of the Winter Court. But he knows what happens to fairies who hunger for things beyond their reach. He carries the memories around his neck like a locket made of leaden chains. A form of remembrance, enveloped in penance.

It is better not to care. It is better not to Hunt with such ferocity.

The Seelie and their swords always win.

His gaze withdraws from the snow and the night sky, settling on his reflection on the glass. His blonde hair is so close-cropped it pushes up into spiky locks, unlike the glorious flowing mane his parents had both sported. He does not want to wear the mantle of glory when glory has no home in the Court Under the Hill. Silver crowns, glass swords, thorny armor - all pointless garbage when they were kings of nothing. The Seelie Court owns the forest and the green, and the Hill was shorn of its forests and its caverns replaced with sewers and flood tunnels.

Whatever Tsukishima’s family once meant, that power is gone.

They are a fallen murder of Crows. A pile of ash, no branches in which to roost. A tale to frighten children into staying in bed, and not at all the reason the humans place fires at their fortress gates, or the reason they bleed goats over ancient stones and beg for mercy. The humans are the new Unseelie, with their destruction and their tall Winter-cold towers. And the Crows, well. The Crows are fluttering echoes of a magnificent past.

Tsukishima stares at the translucent reflection of his face on the glass, at the way he dresses and acts like a human more and more these days. The only part of him that would ever reveal him as Unseelie are his teeth, all pointed, all poison.

But he hides them, because you do not pull the teeth out of a snake’s mouth if the snake does not bite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the plot seems wobbly, it's because I'm wobbly too. Bear with me - I'll get better, I promise :*  
> Again, this wouldn't have happened without B lighting a fire under my ass all day and all night.


	3. Feeding Ducks/Making Coffee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kenma feeds ducks and loses his shit.  
> Also: Kuroo does not know how to flirt appropriately.

Kenma feels a strange sort of affinity for ducks. There is something soothing about the juxtaposition of their mottled feathers against the glassy surface of the lake. He pulls a small tupperware case from his bag and carefully peels off the lid. He never feeds the ducks bread, like the humans insist on doing, because he tried it once and got thoroughly scolded by a mallard. There is nothing more embarrassing than having a small bird lecture you on the causes and effects of angel wing.

He scatters small pieces of cucumber and chopped herring into the water. The ducks flutter their folded wings and charge for the food. In the background, from within the tall reeds, a black shape darts forward in quick, bobbing motions. The water hen chirps as it barges past the ducks and steals a large piece of herring. The ducks scatter, quacking their great displeasure, but the waterhen has its prize.

Kenma smiles. ‘Hinata,’ he whispers to water hen, already rounding the group of ducks for a second sneak attack. ‘You are like Hinata.’

The waterhen steals two slices of cucumber and swims fiercely back to its nest in the reeds, singing out its victory song. The ducks ignore its departure and continue dipping their necks in search of any remaining tidbits. Crows and Trooping Fairies. So similar, yet so separated. Just like ducks and waterhens.

Except the relationship between ducks and waterhens is not one which is laced with hundreds, thousands of years of animosity.

Kenma lets the smile fade from his lips. He bends his head and looks into the now-empty tupperware container. He could write a book on it: how to be in love with your enemy and his beautiful animalistic hunger. How to love the way he tears things to pieces. How to love the way he is jubilant about ripping a hole in your fellow Trooping Fairies. How to shiver with delight when you imagine him touching you, just for a moment, just a single moment, in pure passion, even if that passion is passion for ripping you limb from limb.

Kenma knows he appears quiet on the surface, like a duck drifting along idly. Except the duck is churning, churning away beneath, fighting against the direction of the stream, and no one will ever know until it stops kicking.

Kenma wonders if he will ever stop kicking. He traces the scar on his hand from where he performed his one and only selfish spell. He closes his fist around the scar, hiding it  from sight. If you do not look, it does not exist. Do not look at your reflection in the mirror. Do not look at the black roots of your hair that grew when you stopped trying to look like your human parents. Do not look at the way you tremble out of shape when you think about the end of the Hunt, the end of the Parade, the end where sword must meet the storm of Crows. Do not look when you cut into his neck. Do not look when his magic cuts into your arms.

Do not look. It will not happen, that way. There will be another world, where the difference between Hinata and Kenma is merely the distance of the reeds to the lake’s edge, the clash of duck and waterhen, the life of one human boy in congruence with another.

The ducks depart. There is no more food to give them.

Kenma tucks his hair behind his ear and he sits down on the damp grass by the lake. The early morning mist is beginning to roll away. Hinata will be almost at the end of his running route now, coming up the hill of the park between the acorn trees, where he will round the bend and come down the way over the bridge on the lake, and past the leaning cherry trees, until he ends up here by Kenma’s side. Kenma looks out over the stretch of the lake, but he does not see the telltale flash of red.

In the fall, they sat here together and watched as the wind rippled the leaves and turned the whole row of trees into an ocean of waving red and gold. They walked up back the hill under the acorn trees and Hinata shouted his salutations to the nymphs hiding beneath the thick boughs of the old acorns. They gifted him with showers and showers of gilded leaves, and they settled in his hair like a crown. And so Kenma looked at him and thought about the very first time he turned leaves to gold when they touched his skin. In that moment, there was only the rush of leaves dancing down around them like confetti, Hinata’s delighted belly-deep laughter, and the blooming flame in Kenma’s stomach.

Kenma did not take Hinata’s hand.

_He wants to, he wants to so desperately, because Hinata’s eyes glow and flash in the shifting colors of the dying leaves, and maybe this is why they say death is beautiful, because Hinata will be his death or Kenma will be Hinata’s, but it will be beautiful, because this is as close as they will ever be._

Kenma did not kiss him.

_He can feel Hinata’s breath soft against the falling leaves. Kenma is tied to the Court of the Red Leaves. He will always be of the forest. And the forest loves this boy, this young man, and his red hair and his loud voice and the way he will gasp at everything and always be this excited about everything. But Kenma is made of all the hundred million things he does not do, and the lifetimes of emotions he will not let live in his expressions. So he holds these golden-leaf desires in his throat. This is as far as he will let them rise._

Kenma did not pull him close and beg for forgiveness, because maybe Hinata would never have come to this place where the Court Under the Hill would find him, maybe Hinata would never have been Unseelie, if only Kenma had not made that one fervent wish for a real someone, his own _someone_.

Kenma did nothing. He only watched, and memorized the freckles on Hinata’s nose.

There are no fire-leaves in the trees today.

Kenma’s sword is wrapped up in silvercloth, leaning against his magazines at the back of his cupboard at his university dorm room. No human can discover it. Instead, they will find themselves repeatedly tripping over the magazines until they eventually give up and go away. The sword has not been touched in almost a year. But this is not Kenma’s first time facing a Hunt, so he knows the sword will have to be retrieved soon, and he shall have to go on his scouting patrols. He is good at finding the Crows in all the different places they hide in the city. The animals tell him exactly where the Unseelie fairies like to cluster, the places they feel safe and unguarded, the places they fight and train and harden themselves before they lose most of their base selves to the overpowering rush of the Hunt.  

This is why he was chosen as Pair. This uncanny ability to read, to see, to search, to find.

This, and the fact that the Seelie Queen smelt his secret as soon as he stepped into her Court.

He knows there is a reason the animals all speak to him. He knows why he can pull deep from within him, through the soles of his foot and from the mineral of the Earth, and weave knots of protection and stability through his Seelie companions. A fairy is never given the place of a Pair, they never know how to control their magic, but Kenma has spent a lifetime curbing and clipping his magic into an appropriate form. And yet, for someone who has swallowed their power and their nature, Kenma knows he will never run out of power. He can sense the same bottomless power in Kageyama, which means Kageyama’s own fae-father must have been impossibly powerful.

And as it stands, Hinata is the only one capable of matching that bottomless power.

Kenma wants to see what Hinata will become, when he finally learns to control his shapeshifting and transforms it into a deadlier weapon.

Now, of course, the redhead appears at the top of the hill. Even past the trees, the brilliant flash of his hair winks as he runs down the hill and traces his way past the lake. He spots Kenma as he draws close to the bridge and calls out, leaping up and down like an overgrown frog. It becomes evident that Hinata has abandoned all resemblance of his morning run.

Hinata sprints over to Kenma and drops down to sit next to him on the grass. ‘Hey!’ he grins, barely even out of breath. ‘You fed the ducks?’

Kenma takes in the small beads of sweat clinging to the side of Hinata’s neck and the flush in his cheeks. He looks away, towards the stretch of the lake and the ducks drifting down under the bridge and out of sight. ‘There was a waterhen today,’ he remarks. Then, his voice still cool and soft like the murmuring of the lakewater: ‘When does the Hunt begin?’

Hinata’s turns at the suddenness of the question. His eyebrows crease as he looks at his friend’s face. ‘It’s this evening,’ he replies.

‘I see,’ Kenma says quietly.

So it begins, and so everything else ends.

‘Aren’t you excited?’ Hinata prods. ‘I’m excited. I want to see if you can catch us before we get to ten.’ His teeth flash quickly in the morning light. They are not sharp, like most Unseelie, but they are bright and his eyes are alive with delight.

‘Ten what?’ Kenma asks, although he already knows the answer to this question. He cannot help it. He does not want to look. He should not look. But here he is, peeling away the cover and staring straight into the wound and digging his fingers into the raw flesh to see if it hurts.

‘Ten humans, of course,’ Hinata laughs. He elbows Kenma in the ribs as though it is all some sort of delightful joke, and perhaps to him it is a great wondrous joke, because he is wilder than the Fair Folk ever dream of being, and it is all instinct and hunger with Hinata and he never has to think about what happens after the delight of the Hunt.

Kenma exhales slow through his nose. He cannot look at Hinata like this, because the morning is too blurred around the edges and the redhead is incandescent, and everything that he ran away from is now sitting beside him. ‘Do you know how this all works?’ he asked.

Hinata nods, just within sight of his peripheral vision. ‘They explained it to me,’ he says. ‘When the night falls and when the Hunt howl-song calls to us, we go out and we hunt humans.’

Kenma watches as lakewater falls still, without birds to disturb the water. The sky sits upside-down, the clouds waiting underneath the glassy surface to peel away and reveal the sun. ‘I guess they didn’t explain it to you,’ he says, more to himself than anyone else. ‘They never explain properly to changelings. They just assume we remember everything from before… before we became changelings.’ He shudders as the brief memory of his transformation flickers through his mind. ‘I only know because Kuro told me.’

He does not glance at Hinata, but he knows the redhead is watching him closely, eating up every word.

‘The world of Fair Folk is a messy place,’ Kenma explains. ‘We were not always merely Unseelie and Seelie. There was a Court for each season: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. The Queens of the Fall Court and the Winter Court were once lovers, wife and wife, although the humans like to tell it as though they were king and queen. Something happened, somewhere, before either of us were born, and they declared war between Fall and Winter.’ Kenma placed his hands on his knees so that Hinata cannot see them tremble. ‘Those of us who chose the side of the Queen of the Fall Court went into the woods. Those of us who chose the other, they went under the hill that this city is built on. Eventually, we took the names the humans gave the Courts for the factions in the war.’

‘Seelie and Unseelie,’ Hinata said out loud.

Kenma glanced at him. ‘Exactly,’ he nodded. ‘Seelie,’ he repeated, pointing at himself, ‘and Unseelie.’ His hand moves to rest on Hinata’s bare knee. For a moment, he watches it, his skin pressed against Hinata’s skin, and lets himself memorize the sensation. He let his hand slip away and fall on the grass.

‘And the other Courts?’ Hinata asked. ‘The Spring and Summer?’

Kenma shrugged. ‘I was born into Fall,’ he said simply. ‘My blood is the same blood that runs in the trees, and the same blood that runs in all animals that live in the forest. I can’t leave the Seelie Court. And the Spring and Summer Courts stay out of our war, and out of our business.’ He looks at Hinata and his flame-coloured hair. ‘I don’t know which Court you were born of. I still don’t know why you chose the Winter Court, to be honest.’

Hinata wrinkles his face. ‘I want to be in the Winter Court,’ he announces decisively. ‘I can be better, stronger, faster with the Crows of the Winter Court. Don’t you love being a fairy? I hated being human so much. It was like being chained to the ground, never being able to fly or improve or ever be anything other than what you’re supposed to be. But we have so much possibility now! The war means something, doesn’t it? It means that we aren’t just _human._ ’

Kenma looks down at his hands. He remembers the burn of iron. He remembers letting himself cry for the last time, and letting the grey emptiness spread from his sorrow and swallow him whole. He remembers the last strand of desperation to be human, before he gave in and just accepted that he was not human, and never would be again.

‘This, this fae blood, this fairy nature, is just another thing I have to deal with,’ he says dully. ‘It’s just something I do. It’s just something I am.’ He clenches his fists, hiding the scar on his palm. ‘Every year is the same as the last. Fall fades to winter. The magic of the Winter Court calls for human lives. The knights of the Hunt go look for human lives to take. The Trooping Fairies of the Fall Court hunt the knights of the Winter Court, to stop them from taking human lives. The Fall Court kills the Winter Court. Then most the humans live, and most of the Unseelie survive for the next battle, and after two weeks of this fighting and killing, we go back to pretending nothing ever happened.’

Hinata’s face loses some of its brightness. His eyes search Kenma’s face, trying to understand.

‘It’s always the same,’ Kenma says, quieter now. ‘And I don’t think I care enough to leave the Seelie Court, but I don’t care enough to stay.’

Hinata presses his hands together against his stomach, as though he doesn’t know what to do with them. Suddenly he looks very young, and very small. ‘No one talks about it like you do,’ he mutters. ‘They don’t say it so harshly.’

Kenma smiles. It is the furthest his mouth has curved in a while, so it’s a shame there is no joy in the motion. ‘That’s because us fairies love making everything seem romantic,’ he says bitterly. ‘We love to imagine we are beautiful, mysterious things. But the Hunt isn’t beautiful, and it isn’t mysterious. When you go on your Hunt tonight and look for your humans to kill and torture, I’ll go out and look for you. And if I find you with human blood on your hands, then I have to kill you.’ His voice suddenly catches on the thick sludge in his throat, and he swears the pricking in his eyes is just because he has been staring at the lake for too long. ‘That’s why I’m not _excited_ , Hinata. Because even if you think this is some sort of _game_ , it isn’t. It’s life or death, for you or for me, and after this we just won’t be the same anymore, even if we pretend we are.’

Then he gets to his feet before he can say anything else, and forces himself to leave. He does not look back at where he left Hinata, still sitting on the damp grass with his face wiped blank with shock.

\---

Tsukishima, unlike most of his kind, does not live on the Court’s dime. He has his own human apartment, and his own human job, which he absolutely loves, because it gives him a front-row seat to the miraculous discoveries of the human race. Which is to say, of course, that Tsukishima works in the cafe of the city museum of natural history. The city has a pretty impressive museum, one full of fossils and ancient relics and enormous life-size models of ancient animals that walked the Earth around about the same time the Fair Folk began to appear. There are exhibitions everywhere around the cafe. Paintings hang from the cafe walls. Rocks sit in glass cabinets with curling shapes of prehistoric shells imprinted into their fiber. There is even a stegosaurus fossil on display right outside the cafe boundaries. A real one, not a replica.

Tsukishima loves staring at it between orders, or when he waits for the milk to foam. He likes to imagine the way it might have lumbered over the ground of many yesteryears before, the colors it might have turned when it grew frightened or angry.

He usually takes the same shift as another fairy with similar appreciation for dinosaur fossils, an owlish-looking man with ridiculous grey-streaked hair that doesn’t even pretend to sit normally, and instead reaches for the heavens in stupid spikes. The thing that gives him away the most, though, are his  owlish, slow-blinking eyes. He belongs to the Summer Court, and certainly lives up to his King’s order of cheer and music. If he hasn’t charmed the radio to play sunshine pop, then he usually sings as he works, and if not that, then he is always trying to start a conversation with Tsukishima. Not that Tsukishima bothers to reply.

He doesn’t even really know the owl-fairy’s name, even if they have been working together for five years.

So it is a huge fucking sundae split surprise when the scary wild-haired Seelie fairy from the bar turns up at the cafe. Well, not only that, but he also walks up to the bar, _winks_ at Tsukishima, and then calls over the owl-fairy by name. Like they’re friends.

‘Bokuto!’ the Seelie fairy calls, grinning widely. He leans over the bar and beckons the owl-fairy over. ‘Is this the sort of place you like these days? This is kind of pathetic, compared to your last job. I never thought you would be so boring. Serving coffee to humans?’ He points and laughs in a display of humiliation that seems utterly unnecessary to Tsukishima.

The owl-fairy throws a paper cup at the Seelie fairy’s head. ‘Fuck right off,’ he snaps. ‘No coffee for you. Ever,’ he adds, giving Tsukishima a pointed look. ‘Don’t serve him, dude. Cut him off. Make him starve while he is in my kingdom. He is unworthy.’

Tsukishima narrows his eyes. ‘Bokuto, right?’ he repeats. ‘Shut up. He said you serve coffee to humans. It’s not an insult. You literally serve coffee to humans. Literally.’ He pointed at the coffee machine, and then at the clientele seated in the comfortable chairs of the cafe. ‘ _Fucking literally_.’

Bokuto, since that is probably his name, looks like Tsukishima punched him in the gut. But that is none of Tsukishima’s concern. He wants to go back to brewing coffee and listening to the light jazz on the radio, and ignoring both Bokuto and his Seelie friend. He picks up the carton of milk off of the counter and puts it back in the fridge. A small patch of milk lies on the marble surface of the counter. He swipes at that with a wet washcloth, quietly wishing that the Seelie fairy will just leave them alone.

‘You could easily spell that spilt milk away,’ remarks the Seelie fairy. Tsukishima does not turn to look at him, but he can practically see the smirk on the fairy’s face. His voice is calm and yet still so mocking. ‘Why are you cleaning the human way?’

‘Because,’ Tsukishima growls, dropping the towel onto the counter, ‘I want to.’ He turns to the Seelie fairy with his hands planted on his hips, too irritated to care about Seelie or Unseelie or even fucking Bokuto the fucking owl-fairy. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snaps. ‘If you aren’t going to order a coffee, or take me back to your Court in chains, then go away.’

‘Ooh,’ Bokuto whistles from behind them, ‘you go burned, bro.’

‘Shut up,’ Tsukishima and the Seelie fairy snap at the same time. For some reason, this makes the Seelie fairy look delighted.

Bokuto raises his hands in submission and wanders off to wash some mugs.

‘I’ll have a coffee then,’ the Seelie fairy says with a devilish grin, which is probably supposed to be disarming and charming or whatever, but ends up irritating Tsukishima to no end. ‘Do you want my name and number to put on the coffee cup? I heard that’s what the humans do.’ He finishes this sentence with a positively predatory grin and a wink that lingers a little too long.

‘In Starbucks, sure,’ Tsukishima retorts, but it is too late, and the Seelie fairy is on a roll.

‘The name’s Kuroo and my number is-’

‘I don’t need to know,’ Tsukishima cuts him off. ‘I don’t want to know. I’m going to make your coffee, and you are going to go have your coffee at the furthest end of this cafe, and then you aren’t going to come back here again.’ He narrows his eyes. ‘Do I make myself clear?’

He doesn’t usually rise to such an obvious ploy, but this is his safe space, his place of peace and quiet where he can forget about the whole Seelie-Unseelie malarkey. Nobody knows that he works here, not even his childhood friend, Tadashi, who knows literally everything else about him including the color of his underwear at any given time. To have someone who is, on all accounts, his sworn enemy enter into this temple of human knowledge and threaten him just _gets under his skin_ in a way that makes his teeth sharpen into pointed needles in his mouth. It makes the old magic in his bones burn gold and sharp and reminds him that he is royalty and should not have to suffer this sort of disrespect.

And honestly, if he wanted to think about being royal, he wouldn’t have shorn his hair so close and bound himself in an ironclad building in an iron city. He would be living amongst the other Unseelie right now, in their holes and hiding places, or even in the ancient palace his ancestors built within the forest in the park, now hidden beneath the old carousel that sits collecting rust and age in the place that the humans dare not go. So this Seelie fairy and his stupid antics makes Tsukishima want to just give in to the call of the Hunt and tear out his throat, right here, right now, in front of all these innocent humans.

But he doesn’t.

He was raised better than to act like an animal.

Kuroo grins, seemingly oblivious to Tsukishima’s rising anger. His canines are sharp, almost feline. ‘Any good soldier does their reconnaissance,’ he says archly. ‘This is mine.’ He leans over the counter and presses his forefinger against the taller man’s chest. Slowly, teasingly, he walks his fingers up Tsukishima’s chest until his forefinger and middle finger rest just beneath Tsukshima’s collarbone.

Tsukishima swats his hand away.

‘Reconnaissance?’ he says, raising an eyebrow. ‘I’m a Shield Crow. I protect the servants of the Hunt from you and yours. I don’t kill, I don’t hunt, I don’t do anything worth investigating. Okay? There’s your reconnaissance.’ He flicks his fingers over a paper cup. It fills with coffee, thick and dark and bitter, just to spite the unwelcome patron. Tsukishima places the cup of magicked coffee in front of Kuroo. ‘And here’s your coffee,’ he forces through gritted teeth. ‘Now kindly fuck off.’

The wild-haired fairy blinks. He looks down at the coffee, wrinkles his nose at the sour scent, and then up at Tsukishima. He opens his mouth as if to add another irritating comment.

Tsukishima feels his self-restraint snap.

‘ _Please_ ,’ Tsukishima growls. He doesn’t bother to glamor his teeth, doesn’t bother to dull the gold glow in his eyes, doesn’t even bother to dull the pointed tips of his elfin ears. If the Seelie fairy wants a show, then he’ll get a show. He lets the magic permeate his skin, sharp and iridescent and alive. He knows he can pull the stones right out from underneath them. He can turn the soil beneath the museum to cinders. He can rip it piece from piece. .

Kuroo’s eyes widen. He picks up the cup gingerly and walks away, much to Tsukishima’s relief. Tsukishima lets the magic fall back under, and he feels his features soften again.

From behind him, Bokuto lets out a cackle. ‘You are so savage, Tsukki,’ he hoots. He slaps Tsukishima hard on the back. ‘But good on you, letting him know his place.’

Tsukishima turns warily to his co-worker. By this point, his glamor has fallen back on and the familiar weight of looking human has settled on his shoulders. ‘Don’t call me Tsukki,’ he frowns. He considers Bokuto’s words again. ‘What do you mean, though. His place?’

Bokuto shakes his head and laughs uproariously as though Tsukishima told the best joke he has ever heard. He claps Tsukishima’s shoulder a few times, pointing at him and wiggling his eyebrows meaningfully. ‘You elves,’ he chuckles. ‘Always such a good sense of humor.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Tsukishima states blandly.

Somehow this seems to make the owl-fairy laugh even harder. He presses his hand to his belly as though luxuriating in his own good humor, and sighs satisfiedly. ‘Ah, that’s good,’ he remarks to himself. ‘You reminded him that you’re royalty,’ Bokuto grins, nodding at Tsukishima, ‘which matters because Kuroo is _anything_ but royalty. He might be the Seelie Queen’s favorite knight, but in the end he’s still just a lower-level courtier, but you, you were born with the right to sit on the throne. A throne. Any throne. You could even take my King’s throne,’ he adds, a mischievous glint in his eye.

‘That’s bullshit,’ Tsukishima points out. ‘I don’t belong to the family of the Flowers. I belong to the family of the Forest. I could only take the Fall or the Winter throne.’ The specific rules of fairy lineage means that each throne is tied specifically to certain bloodlines so that a single bloodline cannot take over all the seasons and twist the world’s cycles to its pleasure. The Fall and Winter thrones once sat side by side, so any fae that could sit on throne may sit on the other.

It is only when he sees Bokuto’s widening smile that he realizes his mistake. He fell, hook, line and sinker, for this stupid owl-fairy’s stupid trap. Now Bokuto knows exactly what Tsukishima is.

‘Not that it’s my business,’ the owl fairy hums, leaning against sink, ‘but aren’t you the last heir to your Queen’s throne?’

Tsukishima clenches his fists. He knows he will eventually cut half-moons into his palms from the force of it, but he can’t quite stop. All the pieces of him that gather up to form a barricade are currently lying embedded in his lungs. It is difficult to breathe fully.

His mind flashes with images of ruby-red blood melting an arch into the glittering snow, of a silver-tipped sword singing as it cuts through the air, of barley-coloured hair sweeping out in a fan against the blood and the snow and the muck of the thaw and the slush. He presses his hands against his stomach and wills himself not to throw up. Not here. Not now. Not after holding himself together for so long.

‘I’m nobody,’ he says firmly. ‘I’m nothing.’ He throws the dirty cloth into the sink. ‘I make coffee and I drink whiskey and that is all that I am.’

Bokuto makes a low, hooting call under his breath. ‘You could be more.’

Tsukishima feels his stomach twist horribly. He unclenches his fist and sets about cleaning the rest of the dirty mugs and glasses. ‘I don’t want to talk about this,’ he says firmly. ‘And you shouldn’t talk about things you know nothing about.’ He rubs viciously at a stubborn stain as if it is to blame for all his grievances. ‘Now go take that girl’s order before she throws something at your spiky head.’

Bokuto leaps to attention, finally taking note of the teenager glaring at him and waving a banknote expectantly. While they had been talking, quite the line had built up at the counter.

‘I ordered a caramel macchiato, like, fifteen _hours_ ago,’ she growls. ‘You guys have such shit service. I should complain to the management.’ She sniffs and lifts her chin just so she can look down her pointy little nose at the owl-fairy.

‘Hey, hey, hey,’ Bokuto complains, ‘this ain’t a Starbucks. We don’t do caramel macchia-shit-o’s.’

The girl thrusts her money at Bokuto and gives him a dirty glare. ‘I want to speak to the manager,’ she demands.

‘ _I’m the manager,_ ’ the owl-fairy replies, throwing his hands up in exasperation. ‘And as manager, I say we do not make caramel macchiatos. They aren’t even a thing. Do you even know what a macchiato is?’

The human teenager makes a disgusted noise deep in her throat and curls her lip into a sneer. ‘Then I want to speak to the manager’s manager,’ she orders.

Bokuto growls wordlessly.

Tsukishima smiles to himself. No punishment on earth can match up to the terror of a teenage girl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope it's starting to weave together to make sense.  
> I am sleep deprived and stressed but Haikyuu, guys, Haikyuu is the answer to everything as long as my sister isn't shouting out the plays in my ear. Never watch Haikyuu with someone who used to play volleyball competitively, it turns into a real escapade.


	4. Reconnaissance and Promises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘Nope,’ Kuroo replies happily. ‘You’re coming on this date whether you want to or not.’  
> ‘And why is that?’ asks Tsukishima.  
> Kuroo curls his smile into something positively sinful. ‘Reconnaissance.’  
> ‘Brilliant.’ Tsukishima sighs heavily. No point arguing with that. ‘Let me just get my coat and my wallet.’

When Tsukishima finishes his shift, he likes to take a private tour of the museum. Around five, the visitors start emptying out, but staff are allowed to wander for an hour after museum closing time. The museum closes at six-thirty, so it gives him almost two hours to take his sweet time.

He visits the historical area first, admiring the old clay pots and carved tablets. He cannot read the old human tongue. He is not old enough to remember this. But he is old, old enough to recall the time before electricity and when they still thought a diplodocus  could walk with its neck pointing up like a giraffe.

After looking at old skulls and ancient bronze jewelry, Tsukishima likes to look at all the taxidermy animals. He peers at all the preserved birds, nothing more than skin and feather stuffed full of sawdust and chemicals, and he gawps at the enormous bones of a giant whale that hangs from the ceiling so the skeletal whale swims up above the visitors. He reads the signs describing dolphin migratory patterns. He plays all the animal sounds and calls. He waves at the extinct animals as he passes them, feeling a strange sort of connection to them. Like those poor creatures, he is a living remembrance of a creature once abundant in the forests, now limited to himself: a walking taxidermy model, stuffed full of sawdust and preservatives.

The dinosaurs he saves for last.

He loves the way the t-rex model gleams under the dramatic lighting. He adores the way the predators are set up, with their talons outstretched at the ready for attack, and the way that there are rocks and fake shrubbery posed beneath. He remembers reading once that the humans figured that birds are merely the small descendants of these enormous animals. Tsukishima likes that. The remainder of the Hunt and its Crows are the leftovers of an age where the Hunt was an gargantuan thing, crawling over the windswept hills, searching for blood.

It is here, where he is looking up at the brachiosaurus in silence, counting the pieces that put together its spine, that the Kuroo finds him.

‘You like dinosaurs?’ Kuroo asks, disturbing Tsukishima’s moment of peace.

The blond fairy whirls around. He glares at the wild-haired Seelie fairy, feeling more off-kilter than angry. ‘Why are you here?’

Kuroo shrugs. ‘Bokuto said you’d come here,’ he explains. He comes to stand beside Tsukishima, looking up at the extended neck of the long-dead dinosaur in mild curiosity. ‘Also, I wanted to know,’ he adds nonchalantly, ‘are you free for dinner?’

Tsukishima narrows his eyes. ‘Reconnaissance?’ he questions, making sure to put as much ice in his voice as is physically possible.

The other man seems completely unscathed in the face of his cold front. ‘Yeah, sure, reconnaissance.’ He winks. ‘Let’s call it that. Or we can call it, I don’t know, a date?’ He grins disarmingly.

It is disturbing, for someone with a face so irritating to suddenly morph into someone so devilishly handsome and charming in a matter of moments. It makes Tsukishima even more confused, but he barely has time to process it before the next attack comes.

Kuroo leans forward and drapes his arm over Tsukishima’s neck.

‘I usually have a booth saved in that cute Italian in front of the museum,’ Kuroo murmurs seductively in Tsukishima’s ear. ‘Why don’t you join me for a bit of dinner? Human-style, just the way you like it.’

‘What’s your game here?’ Tsukishima demands, trying to keep his voice cold while he is so close, he is so fucking eyeball-to-eyeball close up to Kuroo that he can count each individual eyelash. ‘What do you think you’re going to get from this?’

Kuroo edges just a breath closer. His breath ghosts, warm and sweet, over Tsukishima’s lips. For a terrifying, splendid moment, Tsukishima thinks he is going to be kissed for the first time in his life. But then the Seelie fairy draws away, slipping his arm off Tsukishima’s shoulder. The cold floods Tsukishima’s system like a ringing slap to his face.

Kuroo’s smile is lazy and utterly devastatingly handsome. ‘Reconnaissance,’ he teases, as though he is merely saying the words but is trying to communicate something utterly filthy within the syllables. ‘Ten o’clock. I’ll order some good wine.’ He presses his fingertips to his lips, kisses them, then presses those same outrageous fingers against Tsukishima’s cheek. ‘ _Ciao_ , beautiful.’

And with a rush of sandalwood-scented cologne, he is gone, leaving Tsukishima in the shadow of the diplodocus, reeling from everything that had just happened.

\---

Sometimes, Kageyama doesn’t know what is worse: to be full Fae, or to be only half.

Kageyama cannot hide what he is, the way the Fair Folk can. When he walks on the streets above ground, he can see mothers yank their children out of his path, he sees people flinch from him, or stare at him long and hard as though trying to figure out what is _wrong_ about him. He knows he is beautiful, but not beautiful enough to be enchanting, only beautiful enough to be disturbing and frightening. His eyes are too dark and his movements too liquid, too unnatural. When he looks at himself in the reflective panels of the city’s tall buildings, he can see the way his features angle and the way his eyes are drawn vicious and his lips stretch thin and dangerous. Any clothes he puts on always end up staining the blue-black of crow feathers. He cannot bend to belong, not among humans, not among Fae, not among mages. He sticks out, a black stamp against a world of color and life.

But he is never hungry, not the way that Hinata is.

He was with Hinata the first time the changeling heard the Call. It was a beautiful summer afternoon in a clearing by the forest, and the air was thick with treacle and honey from the celebrations of the Summer Court deep in the forest. Most of the summer fairies love Hinata. Back then, it was easy to believe that the redheaded changeling belonged to Summer. He danced among the flowers and kissed the cheeks of all the fawn-fairies, promising them gifts of milk and sugar when he came back each day. He was loving and kind and always brimming over with enthusiasm. Kageyama lay in the grass and watched Hinata revel with the other younglings of the Summer Court, content merely to watch.

Then night fell, and a different type of song swept through the forest, one that rose from beneath the hill from the abandoned halls of the Unseelie Court. Kageyama had felt it deep in his bones, felt it grasp at pieces of him and try and tempt him, before it moved across the clearing to Hinata. Kageyama remembers the look on Hinata’s face when the Call hit him. He remembers the way Hinata stiffened, the way his eyes widened with confusion, then loss, before an alien sharpness whittled away the soft honey-sweet and left behind something _hungry_ and _ancient_ and _awake._ He remembers how the summer fairies scuttled away into the forest, where they would be safe from Hinata.

He remembers the way that Hinata whirled away from the forest and towards the downward slope of the hill, how he leapt forwards, how he ripped into a hundred pieces and became a hundred small bodies with too many teeth and oil-slick skin, how he disappeared howling into the night. Kageyama remembers running after him too late, watching as he dove and killed and took what was his.

First there was a swarm, and then there were screams, and then silence.

See, in the Old Days humans were not meant to come to this part of the woods on a half-moon night without protection. But it had been hundreds of years since the Old Days, and these humans had forgotten that. So that night, when Hinata first heard the Call and answered it, Kageyama ran to the bottom of the hill by the forest, and found two dead humans and one changeling.

Two dead humans. And once changeling, no longer wearing his human skin, licking the last scraps of flesh from bone, taking what was offered soft and sweet.

There was no mistaking Hinata for one of the Summer Court after that.

\---

Hinata checks his digital watch for the time as he makes his way down the steps of his university building. He looks up again at the sky, which has only just started to dip into silvery twilight. The moon will turn a deep, wonderful red to mark the first night of the Hunt.

Black, silver, red. The colours of the Hunt.

He remembers the day he first witnessed a Hunt. He was ten, still uncomfortable in his borrowed human skin, trying to run his frustration away and cycle across mountains to burn off his limitless energy. He had been cycling through a particularly wooded area of the mountains in the early evening, the street lights burning amber above him through the light winter mist, when he had heard something that sounded enough like a howl to be eerie but not enough to make him afraid. He had stopped and gotten off his bicycle, trying to find the source of the sound. Then, they had come out of the forest, rippling over the tarmac like whispering shadows, hidden just out of his grasp by the veil between Fae and Human.

There had been looming black dogs with flashing teeth like moonlight on a silent lake, and lolling tongues as red as freshly-spilt blood, and behind them, tall, magnificent men and women riding horses with flanks so black they glowed blue despite the golden light of the street lamps. They had long, pointed faces and pointed ears and long golden hair and incandescent eyes, and the silver-edged swords of spun glass that hung by their hips were long and devilishly sharp. Then behind them, creatures of all shapes and sizes, with sharp teeth and hungry smiles, all decked out in black feathers and silver thorns - a parade of night, a celebration of all things that come alive when the moon is full and the sky is littered with stars.

Since then, Hinata has always known what he is. Not the precise word for it, or the name of his species, or even the shape and form of his power, but he knows he belongs to the night. He wants to run in front of the Hunt, beyond the great black dogs and the golden-haired riders, and further still. He wants to lap up the blood of his victims and offer up their sacrifice to the bloody moon hanging low and content above.

He is more than a Crow. He is the hunger itself, the predators with gleaming red eyes lurking just beyond the comfort of a campfire, the story that humans tell to each other, the reason that people are afraid of the dark. Sometimes he likes to imagine the Hunt cut a piece of its magic and formed it into skin, flesh and bone, and that is where he crawled from. But he doesn’t know, not really, where he came from. He doesn’t know who his true parents are or if he has any at all. No one does. Not Kageyama, who knows almost everything there is to know about the Hunt, not Tsukishima, whose blood is ancient even if he says nothing about it, and not even Daichi, the leader of the Hunt.

It’s a long cycle back into the city from the university. Most people would drive to town, or else not bother with the commute. But Hinata is not most people, and he wears it under the guise of training his body’s endurance. In truth, he has too much energy swimming in his veins, and when he leaves it unchecked for too long, it rushes all out of him like a volcano and pounds everything else out of existence. He used to lose pieces of himself to the wildness that lives inside him. It frightens him now that it never frightened him then, when he forgot how to retain human shape and began to grow fangs and his eyes would glow even with the lights on. So he cycles home every day, pumping his legs away until country becomes suburbia, and then until suburbia fades into city.

Today he only gets as far as the first bus stop when a calico cat saunters into his path. Hinata slams on the brakes and jumps off his bike.

‘Jesus fucking - _Kenma!_ ’ Hinata cries, shaking his fist at the cat. ‘I could have killed you! Are you crazy?’ He tosses his bike aside. It flies in a high arch through the air and lands in the bushes by the roadside. ‘I told you to stop doing this. One day I’m not going to brake in time and you’re going to be hit by all this metal, and it’s not iron, but it’s going to _hurt_!’

He then takes a moment to appreciate the fact that he is currently screaming at a cat at an empty bus stop, and is thankful that no humans are around to witness. In fact, he is also glad that no fairies are around to witness his self-humiliation.

The cat blinks up at him slowly. Then, it _unfolds_ , and suddenly it was never a cat at all, but a man with golden eyes with slits a little too thin for comfort.

‘I have to talk with you,’ Kenma states, his eyebrows furrowed deep into his face. ‘It’s serious.’

Hinata’s stomach lurches. ‘Are you still angry with me?’ he asks.

Kenma has not replied to any of his texts since the day they had that argument in the park. Hinata had opened his big fat stupid mouth, and then Kenma had gotten upset and _left_ , and then everything had gone to shit and even kicking at the ducks and screaming into the lake did nothing to make the queasiness subside. His stomach has been in painful knots ever since.

But the Seelie fairy shakes his head dismissively. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he frowns. ‘I’m not talking about that, us, me getting upset. That was just, us.’ He gestures sharply away from his body. ‘This is more important.’

‘More important than you being angry with me?’ Hinata demands incredulously.

Kenma’s eyes narrow in a way that makes the redhead shut up immediately.

‘Shouyou,’ the fairy says grimly, calling him by his human-given name, ‘listen. There’s something bad in the air today. I don’t know what it is. It smells rotten. I was worried about this Hunt before, but now…’ he trails off, shaking his head as if to clear it. He glances at Hinata. His eyes are luminescent in the fading light. ‘Tell your knights to call tonight off. It’s too dangerous. I can’t calculate the risks. I can’t keep you safe.’

He falters, then, and presses his hand over his mouth as if he had let something loose he was not supposed to. There is a brief, yawning moment when Hinata thinks he can see into the other changeling’s face, and the careful apathetic mask melts away, and he can see something young and vulnerable and shivering with too much emotion. But the moment finishes before he can fully comprehend it, and the cool exterior slides back into place like a gate swinging shut, and Hinata is left outside feeling cold and lost.

‘You don’t want me to go on the Hunt tonight,’ he repeats. The words feel numb on his tongue. ‘Why? You don’t want to fight me?’ Then, in a small voice: ‘You don’t think I’m good enough anymore?’

‘I think you’re wonderful,’ Kenma replies, but his voice is flat and his eyes are all hollowed out with something darker than exhaustion. ‘This isn’t about that.’ Kenma reaches out with his hand, just barely brushing over the zipper of Hinata’s jacket. He presses his lips together until they turn white, and with a flinch, he drops his hand. He smiles a sad, small smile that twists like a jagged blade in Hinata’s stomach.

Hinata does not know what he did this time to make his friend look as though Hinata kicked him in the face. He doesn’t know how he keeps fucking up lately.

‘Please,’ Kenma says softly, gently, like a prayer that some old Ancient might obey from beneath the cold earth. ‘Please, Shoyou. Stay home tonight.’

‘But I want to see you on the battlefield,’ Hinata says before he can stop himself. ‘I want to fight you. I told you - I’m going to beat you. The Unseelie will beat Seelie this year.’

Kenma flinches. Hinata feels like tearing out his tongue and stuffing it down his throat. He is wild and fast and brash and strong and right now he wishes he was anything but that.

Because there is a brightness in Kenma’s eyes that has nothing to do with joy or excitement. Hinata can feel it like a broken limb, a haunting movement, a ghost of agony echoing in tandem with the carefully-suppressed pain in Kenma’s eyes.

‘Stay home, Shouyou,’ the Seelie fairy says, barely above a breath. ‘Stay home, and be safe. I will still be waiting for you, on another night. You’ll have your chance to face me. Don’t worry,’ he adds, his smile growing terrible and sad. ‘Stay alive another day so you can kill me, the way you’ve always wanted to.’

‘Kill?’ Hinata repeats, bewildered, but Kenma is gone in a brush of a hand against his cheek and a whisper of autumn leaves upon the cold night air.

The road stretches long and empty ahead. The street lamps glow warm and gold, and the sky has turned a deep indigo. There are no cats prancing across the street, and no shapes wait in the bus stop. The moon rises full and bloody above, and the howl-song of the Hunt rises thick in the wild wind, but Hinata feels empty and guilty and dirty and wrong and he wishes he could wipe it all away to where he walked under the falling red-orange leaves of fall, and when Kenma made him gold-leafed wreaths for him to wear, and they both still thought they had all the time in the world.

\---

Tsukishima is happily making himself some tea when his wonderful evening is interrupted by a sharp rapping on the door of his apartment. He looks down into the pale liquid of his green tea, then up at his full-colour poster of a feathered raptor. He narrows his eyes suspiciously at the door.

Tadashi would never come over without first calling. And despite being older than Hinata and Kageyama combined, this is the first year Tadashi and Tsukishima are joining the hunt. He is not quite so chummy with the other members of this year’s Hunt that he would feel comfortable with them dropping by to visit him at his precious human home.

He grits his teeth. It could just be his neighbor asking for a cup of sugar. Humans do that, from time to time, don’t they? But he can smell the faint tinge of something musky, tinted with sandalwood and the light notes of pine. There is a fairy on the other side of that door.

He braces himself, reminding himself that he is one of the best Shield-Crows around and that he is pretty good at attacking too if it comes to that. With a quick straightening of his shoulders, he opens the door.

Kuroo the infinitely irritating asshat grins straight at him, clutching a bushel of eggshell-blue foxgloves in his hand, tied delicately with a white ribbon. He hands the flowers over to Tsukishima, who takes them more out of automatic reflex than anything.

‘Good evening,’ the Seelie fairy drawls. ‘I’m here to pick up my date.’

Tsukishima stares at Kuroo, trying not to feel impressed. ‘How do you know where I live?’ he demands.

The wild-haired fairy flashes a wide grin. ‘I have my ways,’ he says, winking suggestively. He laughs, warm and loud, and shakes his head. ‘I’m kidding,’ he chuckles. ‘Bokuto has your address down on his employee list. He gave me your number too, but I thought it would be kinda weird to call you.’

Tsukishima arches an eyebrow. ‘Because coming to my apartment isn’t weirder,’ he says, his voice thick with sarcasm. He sighs, glancing over his shoulder. His book sits on his couch, calling to him, promising a quiet evening of rest. ‘There’s no chance you’re going to let me off this dinner, is there?’ he remarks, trying not to sound too despairing.

‘Nope,’ Kuroo replies happily. ‘You’re coming on this date whether you want to or not.’

‘And why is that?’ asks Tsukishima.

Kuroo curls his smile into something positively sinful. ‘Reconnaissance.’

‘Brilliant.’ Tsukishima sighs heavily. No point arguing with that. ‘Let me just get my coat and my wallet.’

\---

Kageyama stands leaning against the walls of the subway platform, frowning deeply down at his phone. This is the duty of a Pair - stand at the fucking subway all night until someone comes to pick him up like he is some sort of child to be babysat. He taps out a quick text to the older Pair of their motley crew, a grey-haired mage that currently goes by the name Sugawara. Sugawara is one of the few people able to keep the entire group of Crows stable.

Kageyama and Sugawara can not be more different - like two sides of a coin, two complete opposite versions of what a Pair can be. Where Kageyama has boundless power and recklessness, Sugawara is gentle and careful with his delicate starlight magic. Kageyama is made of frowns and anger and abrasiveness. Sugawara barely looks like he has any human blood, with sweet features and gently curling silver hair. His voice is like the dance of a cool stream at midnight, and he is never short on compliments for even the least talented of the Crows. Everyone likes Sugawara. Everyone _endures_ Kageyama.

But Sugawara cannot knot his magic as deftly or even half as quickly as Kageyama can, and more importantly, Sugawara can only feed to other’s magic, while Kageyama has done his fair share of attacking. His knives are not just there for decoration, after all. One day Sugawara will have to step aside and let Kageyama take his place as the mage of the Hunt. That thought frightens Kageyama. It excites him.

His phone lights up as Sugawara sends back a swift reply. He swipes irritatedly at the screen and reads the message.

‘What the hell do you mean, you’re sorting it out?’ Kageyama says out loud, sounding a lot more petulant than he intends to. ‘Am I going to fucking stand here all night?’

Further along the platform, an exhausted-looking woman in crumpled suit and battered heels throws the dark-haired man a nervous look. She clutches at her handbag tightly.

‘Sorry,’ Kageyama sighs, lifting his hand at the woman in apology. ‘Bad day.’

The woman stares at him in something that might be horror but is probably exacerbated by the fact that she got caught in the rain and her mascara is running. She walks further up the platform, putting more distance between herself and Kageyama. He sighs tiredly and looks down at his phone. He really should make peace with the fact that he’s not going anywhere anytime soon tonight, and should get real fucking comfortable with standing in this piss-scented tunnel.

Underground is where the Unseelie belong, deep beneath the roots of the old trees and close to the earth from where they first crawled blinking and screeching in the first days of their creation. Kageyama is not true Unseelie. He can feel it in his bones and in the loop of his magic, the way it itches and coils up under his skin agitatedly, begging for the release of the open sky and a vast stretching terrain where wild horses charge through the long grass and bison murmur the Land Song as they map their lives in soil and rock and tree. Those lands are gone too, taken from those old beings the way the Hill was taken from the Unseelie and their Kin. But the same hollow wind remains, dragging through the empty plains and drifting over desert and water to Kageyama, to feed his constant whirling stream of power.

Echoing shrieks rise from the black tunnel to the right of the platform. A howling wind pushes out of the tunnel, tossing up leaflets and yanking at a commuter’s hat, spinning it up into the air and nearly dropping onto the tracks before the owner of said hat halts its flight to freedom. The train erupts from the tunnel’s mouth, thundering past too quickly to make much of its passengers but a warm yellow glow in the windows. The next train to pass shall be the one to stop at the platform and take its weary passengers out to the suburbs and home to their cosy fireplaces.

And Kageyama will still be standing here fucking waiting.

He looks at his messages again. Sugawara has not sent him anything new. Kageyama considers ditching the Hunt for tonight and spending his night in one of those open-all-night diners, where he can watch whatever shitty television show is playing in low volume. Or he can return to their cafe and drink coffee and read a book. Anything but this dull, dull, dull waiting.

The next train arrives with a deafening screech of its brakes. Kageyama winces hard as the last strains of noise die off, barely registering the clipped voice informing the people on the platform of the train doors opening. A few straggling passengers step out onto the platform: a group of giggling teenage girls who are wearing makeup probably intended to disguise their youth but only accentuates it; an exhausted looking babysitter and her accompanying charge, currently with his thumb stuck squarely in his mouth and his eyes bleary and sleepy ( _zoo trip, the scent of giraffes and polar bears sticks to their souls and Kageyama wants to hurdle himself to a place where the land is flat and huge and the sky is fucking endless_ ); a couple linked arm in arm gazing into each other’s eyes; and a short, small-framed man with familiar flaming-red hair.

‘Oh,’ Kageyama hums to himself. He hadn’t been expecting Hinata.

Hinata turns his head and his face lights up with a broad smile as he catches sight of Kageyama. He waves his arm above his head and practically skips as he makes his way through the small crowd to where the mage is standing. Behind Hinata, the train doors slide closed and the train makes it way back into the darkness of the tunnels, leaving behind another gust of whirling wind.

Kageyama gives his phone one last cursory glance before pocketing it. No news so far from anyone, but it is early in the evening yet, and at least now he has company. He draws his scarf tighter around his neck and drops his hands into his coat pockets. The train brought with it a slight chill from deep in the tunnels, where the frost fairies make their home behind walls of brick and mortar. Even those solitary creatures are waiting for the gates of the Court Under the Hill to open once more, for in the Winter, all Folk dark and wicked may find a place to revel with the Unseelie. At least, that was the way it was before Seelie won the war and Unseelie slunk into the narrow shadows of the city, to be poisoned by smoke and smog and iron.

‘Hey, Kageyama,’ Hinata chirps. He claps his hand on Kageyama’s arm hard enough for it to jostle the knives strapped to the mage’s ribs. ‘Stop daydreaming! Let’s go hunt.’

Kageyama glares at the shorter fairy. He peels Hinata’s hand off his arm and flicks it away. ‘Hit me again and I’ll kick you in the face,’ he snarls.

Hinata only laughs, bright and sharp. The arching tunnel above the station rings with the sound, ringing with crystal clear peals of laughter too musical, too sweet to come from a human throat. Hinata’s human skin is loose, and bits of his incandescence is beginning to slip through. His hair rustles in the wrong direction, against the wind blowing from the tunnel, and the red is less autumnal and more the bright ruby of freshly spilt blood. His pupils are all but swallowed in the swimming gold of his eyes, and his teeth are too sharp, his ears too pointed beneath the fall of his hair. Even his skin shimmers the wrong color, swallowing in the cold white light of the subway lights and emitting a sunlit glow instead, all gold and mica dancing on his skin.  

Part of him pities whoever the changeling targets tonight. Another part of him, the old part that comes from prairie and enormous lakes, is delighted.

But Kageyama is not ruled by his parts and sections, and so he folds his arms sternly over his chest and fastens a disapproving look on his face. ‘You know the rules,’ he reminds Hinata. ‘This is our first Hunt. We can’t do anything until we’ve had the go ahead.’

Hinata pouts. ‘Oh please,’ he cajoles, grabbing Kageyama’s hands. ‘Please, please, please. You can’t hear them, but I can, I can hear the hounds and the horns and the Song and I _have to be out there or it will kill me._ ’

Kageyama’s eye twitches slightly. He can feel his resolve folding pathetically fast. To be honest, he was getting bored out of his mind anyways. What harm would it really be just to go out and take a look? They wouldn’t even have to hunt properly. Maybe they could do just a little teasing, a little stalking, a threat here and there to remind the humans of the city exactly what hill they built their towers upon.

‘Please,’ Hinata presses, leaning in way too close for comfort.

‘Okay, fine!’ Kageyama snaps. He shoves Hinata’s forehead out of his face. ‘Stop it already. Fine. You get your way.’

Hinata claps his hands and laughs in celebration. ‘Finally!’

He races up out of the subway and onto the street as though spurred on by the hounds and riders of the Hunt of old, with Kageyama close on his heels.

On the quiet streets, the night is ripe and there is the scent of the Hunt upon the wind. Hinata lifts his hands to the winter sky and bays a long, eerie howl. The Hunt sings back in response, high and wailing like the interlude to a hurricane. High above, from curling clouds grey against the black of the sky, snow begins to fall.

The city belongs to the Winter Court now.

\---

In a different part of the city, Tsukishima hesitates as he is getting into Kuroo’s car. He frowns, tilting his head. There is something strange about the music in the air, something off-key hidden in the strains of the Hunt song. His stomach pinches tight and his skin crawls with something slick and oily. He wants to puke into the gutter, or maybe to scream, or just to go back upstairs into his warm flat and get into bed and ignore the warning bells screaming in his blood.

‘You alright?’ the dark-haired fairy frowns. He looks genuinely concerned.

Tsukishima manages a wavering smile. ‘Ah, um, fine. Fine. It’s nothing.’ He nods to himself. ‘Nothing,’ he repeats, even though at this point he knows he is lying and he is fooling absolutely no one.

Then suddenly, something in the core of the rock deep, deep, deep down _shifts_.

Tsukishima stumbles and falls against the car door. He stares down at it, deeply offended by both his feet for failing and the car door for getting in his way of collapsing to the ground. He no longer knows which way is up. The center of his balance has moved and he does not know where he is. The Order is broken.

Kuroo slams the door closed on his side of the car. He rushes over to the blond fairy, already reaching out to support his weight and makes it just in time to catch Tsukishima before he falls flat on his ass.

‘Whoa, hey,’ he says worriedly. His breath is warm against the back of Tsukishima’s ear, and his chest is strong and his skin is hot and full of magic. ‘Hey, what’s wrong? Tsukki, Tsukki, talk to me.’ Gentle fingers press away the hair from Tsukishima’s clammy forehead.

Tsukishima feels as cold as the wind scraping over the car. He feels shivery and sick and like his bones are cracking. He pulls himself together with great effort, planting his feet on the ground. His stomach is cramping and his head is whirling. He tries to step outside of the supportive circle of Kuroo’s arms but the world twists viciously and he stumbles again.

‘Careful,’ Kuroo warns, catching him before he falls. He eases Tsukishima into the passenger seat of the car. He leans in close, his face wrinkled with concern.

He really is handsome, this Seelie fairy. He is even more handsome this way, the lines of his face drawn and solemn and almost regal, like he should be the one sitting upon a throne instead of his tempestuous Queen.

‘Kuroo,’ Tsukishima says, narrowing his eyes. ‘I need a favor from you. Do me this favor, and I’ll give you anything you want. Whatever boon you ask of me, I’ll give it to you.’

The handsome fairy presses his palms on Tsukishima’s cheeks as though he is made of glass, all gentle and careful, and it hurts in a strange, savage way in Tsukishima’s ribs. He is not meant to be treated like treasure. He is cold, distant, sarcastic. Hasn’t Kuroo seen his shorn head? Hasn’t Kurroo smelt the bloodstain on his skin? Maybe Tsukishima should peel up the edges of his sleeves and show the seven moons branded by hot iron onto his forearms, reveal his darkest, deepest secret to Kuroo so he will stop holding him like this, like Tsukishima _matters._

‘Tell me what you need,’ Kuroo says softly, like a promise.

Tsukishima winces.

Because he was caught unawares, because of the breaking of the rules by which his Kin have always lived by, he is not guarded against the Magic of the Court with No Name. A promise means more than a promise. A promise given with soft words under a blood moon is far more than a promise, if taken without a gift offered in return.

Tsukishima’s brother took a promise once. He paid for it in blood.

‘You have to ask for something in return,’ Tsukishima insists, feeling desperation bitter in his throat. It is unattractive and disgusting. He wishes for the hundredth time, the millionth time, that he was born of different blood and different brethren. ‘You have to ask for something otherwise we’ll be in deeper shit than we already are.’

Kuroo frowns, but seems to understand. ‘Okay, how about a redo of our date?’

Tsukishima blinks. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I suppose that’ll do.’

‘Friday, then, three in the afternoon,’ Kuroo offers, as if arranging dates with your mortal enemy is something completely normal. He drops his hands from Tsukishima’s face and settles them on his shoulders instead. ‘Now, what do you need?’

Tsukishima feels some of the panic lessen. He breathes in slowly. Some of the pain in his stomach fades, and the dizziness recedes somewhat. ‘You need to take me to the place in the park where oak meets fallen pine,’ he orders crisply.

Kuroo gives him a blank look.

Tsukishima rolls his eyes. ‘The creepy ladybug statue,’ he clarifies. ‘Behind the creepy ladybug statue.’

‘Ohh, there,’ says Kuroo, nodding. ‘Right, buckle in. To the park we go.’ He smiles gently, squeezing Tsukishima’s shoulder. ‘There’s some color back in your cheeks. I’m glad.’

And with that, he shuts the car door, leaving Tsukishima sitting with his heart pounding and his stomach still sick and an anguished yearning because he was offered a promise under the blood moon from a fairy with gentle hands and a wicked smile, and he _said no_. He presses his fingernails into his palms until they bleed.

‘Remember,’ he whispers to himself. ‘Remember, you fucking idiot.’

_Remember a silver-edged sword singing through the air. Remember blood upon the snow. Remember the price of promises, the price of wanting, the price of taking anything that once belonged to the Court with No Name._

_Remember._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh this is such a jumpy chapter T.T  
> The next one is gonna be a real kicker... I've already written half. *Edited because plot inconsistencies meh*


	5. The Hunters and the Hunted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Hunt begins, everything goes tits up, and Tsukishima makes another bargain.

There is a strangeness in the air tonight, one that makes most locals button up the collars of their coats and stick to the brightly-lit parts of the city. Most cities have a rhythm, an undercurrent that pulses and draws each person within her boundaries together. But this city is one which has been planted where it is not welcome, a blunt eruption of glass towers and grey buildings and smoke and iron and fumes amongst the rolling hills of green. The edges of the city have too many weeds growing out of the cracks in the asphalt. The bushes don’t like to stay hemmed. And the winters love to freeze up car engines and bury doors under five feet of snow. And every year, the city’s artificial rhythm dies out and is replaced by something deep and old and untethered, untrained, and _hungry_.

The locals know better than to go out in dark alleyways when the moon turns red and the night wind screams around corners like a creature tortured. They turn their televisions on louder. They hang up pretty lights and talk about Christmas and crowd around bars and drink and watch the hockey or the football or the baseball or whatever else.

But not everyone here is a local.

A man wanders down a dingy street. Fluorescent lights shimmer pink, green and blue above, screaming _girls, girls, girls_. The man sees no girls loitering around, but it’s cold enough to freeze hell up here, so he pays it off to the god-awful weather.  He glances at his watch, then up at the sky. The wind lashes out at his face like knives, but he just shrugs his way through its onslaught. He carries a paper bag with a bottle full of brown liquor and he has two knives stowed in his pockets. He might not end up using his knives tonight. Some cities don’t have the sort of girls who look pretty when they bleed. But this city might. It has a sort of seductive appeal that he can’t quite get out of his system.

He turns down into an alleyway that is smothered by the stench of urine and musk. The last time he was in town, he got a really good gram of coke from a dealer here. He likes the high when he hunts.

But the alleyway is void of life, but for the scurrying of rats into the sewers, and piles of cardboard boxes and crates of empty glass bottles stacked up against the brick walls. The ground gleams wet from the newly-fallen snow, reflecting the eerie red of the moon. At the end of the alley, there is a townhouse with an overgrown garden. Tall grass presses against a tall iron gate, curling its ends over the tops of the gate and throwing shadows that resemble arms reaching out, clawing at the paved ground.

The man narrows his eyes, looking around again for any signs of the dealer.

The streets are empty. The alleyway is quiet but for the sharp screech of the rising wind.

A figure appears at the far end of the alleyway, dark and tall and amorphous. The lights in the street behind the man flicker - once, twice, thrice.

‘Hello?’ the man calls uncertainly.

The figure drops suddenly, a loping enormous creature with rolling muscles and bulging sides. The man lets out a yelp and steps back. He rubs his eyes fiercely. The black mass writhes as it approaches, growing limbs and faces and expanding until it fills up the entire alleyway. A growling rumbles, deep and menacing, and white fangs flash. Suddenly there is not one creature, but three.

Three dogs. Enormous, black-coated dogs, with fur standing on end and teeth bared and mouths frothing.

The man lets out a shout of fear. He hurls his paper bag at the dogs. It crunches into the ground, a mere few inches from the largest dog’s face. The dog looks up into the man’s eyes and lifts its hackles.

The dogs charge, and the man runs for his life.

He sprints down the street, screaming for help. The dark doors of the strip clubs stand impassive as he streaks by. Plastic bags and scattered ticket stubs from adult movie theatres chase after the man’s heels, mocking his escape. The dogs snap and howl at his ankles. He runs and calls and begs and pleads for help until his voice turns hoarse, until he gives up yelling and just runs. The strip ends at the beginning of a graveyard; the land beyond this point stretches up a hill sitting in heavy darkness. He spots a girl standing in the distance, leaning against the last lamp post with a cigarette burning ember-orange at her cherry-red lips.

He calls to her for help, for her to call for the police, but she only looks at him with mild interest. He stumbles to a stop in front of her and grabs her by the shoulders. He pleads with her. His face is a mess, and he sobs brokenly, and she is precisely the sort of creature that would bleed so prettily under his knives, but the dogs are close now, baying joyfully.

She pulls the cigarette from her lips and flashes him a smile full of shark-like teeth. Her eyes turn milky white. Her black hair uncurls from around her shoulders and stretches towards him, tendrils of seaweed under the surface of a cold, black lake.

The man shrieks in fear and runs into the darkness. The dogs follow, singing their jubilation as they chase their prey.

The graveyard rises up at the topmost peak of the hill. A sycamore stands lonely at the top of the hill, framed by the bloody moonlight. The man trips and scrambles up the hill and over the graveyard, passing under the heavy branches of the sycamore. His bloodied knees scatter droplets of crimson onto the grass and wet soil as he passes. The sycamore drinks in the unwilling sacrifice. Somewhere beneath, the gates of the Court Under the Hill shiver in anticipation.

The man finds an old groundskeeper’s home, a decrepit structure made of decomposing wood with an soot-stained wall silhouetted against the bloodmoon. He forces himself past the tall brick walls through the rusty iron gates. The demon-hounds are at his feet now. He leaps inside the safety of the groundskeeper’s home, and slams the gate against his attackers. White jaws snap and froth at the bars angrily, but come no further, blocked by the iron bars of the gate. The man heaves a sigh of relief, stepping away from the gate. He presses his back against the damp brick wall of the abandoned building. The cold slices straight into his spine, but it is a welcome relief.

Above him, a low, rumbling growl sounds threateningly.

He looks up. Framed by the bloodmoon, a black dog leans down over the edge of the roof. Its eyes gleam red in the night and its teeth flash sharp and white. The man barely has time to scream before those teeth are fastened around his throat and breaks his neck in a single sharp twist. His life sinks into the earth. The first offering is made to the Hunt, and the Hunt is pleased.

Later, when all the organs have been consumed and the dogs are crunching on bone marrow and ribcages, the largest dog lifts its bloodstained muzzle and peers inquisitively at one of the others.

‘ **Say** ,’ it rumbles in a voice that is not a voice, but a growl with words, ‘ **Tanaka, did you see Kageyama or Hinata anywhere tonight?** ’

One of other dogs pauses its work on the man’s face. It tilts its head thoughtfully for a moment, before shaking its head. ‘ **No** ,’ it replies. ‘ **Hey, hey, Noya.** ’

A third dog lifts its head and huffs in response.

The second dog paws at the dead man. ‘ **Aren’t they with Daichi and Suga?** ’

The last dog narrows its eyes as it attempts to remember. ‘ **I thought they were going solo**.’

‘ **They can’t go solo! They don’t know what the rules are** ,’ the second dog argues. He stomps his front paw and growls in frustration.

‘ **Hey,** ’ complains the third dog. ‘ **Don’t take it out on me.** ’

‘ **We’ve lost our prize kids** ,’ the largest dog concludes mournfully. ‘ **Daichi is going to kill us**.’

\---

There is a bridge that leads out of the city and stretches far, far out and away. In the early spring of 1967, a city planner was permitted to plot out the points of the bridge in order to connect the city in the hills to the rest of the human world. The only way in and out of the city was past a number of old, crumbling buildings from the Old Days, when the city was only a scattering of buildings attempting to look grand while the forest swallowed up any area left untended for too long. These old buildings stood like the bleached bones of a long-since extinct creature, standing sentinels at the city border, choked in thick vines and smothered by crawling plants. The city planner concluded that they had to be demolished, and put an order in for a team to come and destroy the old buildings. And yet, each time the demolition team came to get rid of the buildings from the Old Days, something would go wrong.

The dynamite would be damp. The sky would pour down with torrential rain. The wrecking ball would come off its chain and kill maybe one or two workmen.

The people of the city decided that the old buildings must be cursed, and so they went ahead and built the bridge over the buildings. Now the old white structures stand squashed beneath the long stretch of the city bridge, decomposing slowly and carefully. They no longer look quite so intimidating to the humans, and so in the summer and in the spring, teenagers will come and climb the ruins and pick the purple flowers that grow from the climbing vines. The flowers bring good luck, but only when picked when in full bloom.

Nobody comes here in the winter.

At least, no humans do.

Hinata and Kageyama pick their way up the pebbled beach by the river bank, a good five feet below the towering walkway built to accommodate for high tide. The moon sings to them conspiringly as they make their way towards the bone-white buildings of the old city. The mage carries his knives in his left hand as he loops his magic, white-hot and black as night, around his fingers. Hinata bounces up the way in front of him, his feet making no mark on the beach as he leaps up, down, up, down, fists clenching and unclenching in anticipation. Kageyama knows Hinata can probably smell the fresh blood waiting to be spilled in offering to the Hunt.

‘I’ve been tracking this man for a while now,’ Kageyama tells Hinata conversationally. ‘You know I like to use my brain when I hunt, unlike _some people_ not worth mentioning.’ He punctuates these words with a long glare at his Pair.

Hinata kicks the back of his leg playfully. ‘Oh, come on,’ he grins. ‘I don’t plan because you plan for me! I’m your weapon.’

The dark-haired Pair kicks Hinata back with no small amount of force. Hinata yells in startled protest, which makes Kageyama very satisfied indeed.

‘Yes, that’s all very well and good, but maybe you should learn how to think about what you’re doing,’ retorts Kageyama.‘Think about how much more powerful we could be if we both had control over our powers.’ They have had this conversation all the time, and it usually ends more or less the same way, with Hinata telling him to fuck off and Kageyama bristling because he knows he’s right, he knows how much potential Hinata has in him.

It’s all lighthearted and fun and they both know that in the end, Kageyama will always be there to guide and protect his Pair. But today, today Hinata does not respond with a loud complaint. Instead, he drops his head and presses his palm flat against his ribs as though his lungs are in pain.

‘I didn’t join the Hunt for control,’ Hinata says quietly. ‘I joined it to lose control.’ He clenches his hand into a fist and digs it deep in the space between his two ribs. ‘Why can’t I just hunt and forget? It’s shit, it’s so shit being human and I want to be more than human, anything but human. Being human means you get hurt and you can’t do anything about it.’

He is five steps ahead of Kageyama now, his bright hair turned into a halo by the street lights. His shoulders are stiff and tight, like a spring coiled tight ready to explode.

‘Did you have a fight with Kenma?’ Kageyama asks bluntly.

Hinata whirls back around on him, his face beetroot red and his fists raised above his head. ‘No!’ he shouts in a fit of embarrassment. His face squidges up until his eyes are tiny in his face, and his cheeks are puffed out, and then he lets out a loud sigh. ‘Fine,’ he says, the word short and fast like a bullet. ‘We had a fight. We had two fights.’ He makes a loud noise of frustration and stomps up and down on the pebbled beach.

The wind tugs reproachfully at Kageyama’s jacket, but he just brushes it off with a twitch of his right hand.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ Hinata is wailing, shaking his fists at the moon as though it were somehow personally responsible for his torment. ‘I don’t know what I did. But he’s angry with me and I can’t make it better and now he won’t ever meet me in battle again.’

Kageyama considers this, then looks up over the way towards the buildings. There are five different traps laid out for his chosen prey, all of which will work perfectly. All the human needs to do is be predictable, the way humans never fail to be. The spells will hold until tomorrow. Hinata is no use when he’s in a hyper-emotional state anyways, so they may as well go hang out at the midnight cafe until the others are done with their hunts.

‘How about we go back and wait for-’

‘NO!’ cries Hinata. ‘No. How can you even, how can you even say something so awful?’ There are tears bright like jewels in his eyes and his cheeks are all ruddy from the effort of keeping them from spilling over.

‘Well you’re the one who can’t focus!’ snaps Kageyama angrily, stabbing his forefinger into Hinata’s chest. ‘I won’t have you spoil my perfectly laid plans. If you can’t hunt then don’t fucking hunt, damnit!’

‘No!’ shouts Hinata, slapping Kageyama’s hand away.

‘For fuck’s sake, stop being an idiot,’ growls Kageyama. Didn’t they do all of this arguing in the fall already? Why are they doing this now, out in the open where any trooping fairy could come across them and slit their throats? ‘Let’s go back. If you can’t shut up, then we need to go back. Right. _Now._ ’

They may be the best attack team the Unseelie has, but without a Shield Crow at their side, they are as vulnerable as a snail with a cracked shell. He glances up at the moon, then up at the bone-white buildings half-hidden under the bridge. He hates feeling nervous, but right now his skin feels as though it is about to crawl right off his flesh and dive into the murky river water for protection. There are too many places behind which someone can hide, too many shadows he cannot look into. He feels eyes watching them from everywhere.

In all honesty, Kageyama knows the ambush is coming before it actually happens. They are being loud and now any cover of darkness has been completely blown by Hinta jumping up and down like a demented bunny with ginger hair. Quite frankly, they were so fucking stupid, coming out here without any of the older servants of the Hunt, that they deserve to be ambushed and killed on the riverbank. So he doesn’t even shout when the wind gets knocked out of him, when a heavy blade presses against the delicate skin of his throat, or even when he hears Hinata cry out half in anger, half in fear. He doesn’t struggle when he is thrust down on his back so hard he hears his ribs break. He blinks the grit and pebbles out of his eyes and looks up at the creature currently pressing him to the ground with a heavy foot and a hard boot-heel.

Kageyama doesn’t really know what he was expecting to see, but it certainly wasn’t a pair of familiar wood-brown eyes and that same fucking smug smile that fucking infuriated him all the way through his youth.

‘Oikawa _,’_ Kageyama hisses through clenched teeth. ‘You _motherfucker._ ’

Framed against the red blood moon’s light, a tall man looms over Kageyama with his hands planted on his hips. His spiked boot digs deep into the younger mage’s ribs viciously, and yet his smile is broad and cheerful. He wears the soft green of sprouting buds, and a delicate chain mail that looks as though it were made from spun glass, clearly stolen from the corpse of an elf because no mage can make that sort of beautiful armor. Also, Kageyama knows the sort of twisted asshole Oikawa is.

‘To-bi-o,’ the tall mage sings, lilting through the words mockingly. ‘To-bi-o. Ka-ge-ya-ma. I’ve got you, To-bi-o.’ As he sings the last syllable of Kageyama’s name, he lifts his foot from the fallen Crow’s chest. He laughs delightedly, and then brings his heel down hard.

Kageyama feels the magic in the kick before it hits him. He feels his ribs shatter and puncture his lungs. He feels the blinding agony, feels the blood froth on his lips as air and blood come shuddering up his throat and into his mouth, feels himself drowning on his own blood. He never expected this, never ever expected this, not since he found Hinata and Hinata found him. He’s supposed to be safe with the Crows. He’s supposed to be free from the tormenting of the other mages.

The river has come up to take him away. It folds its grey curtains around his body and coaxes him downward. He is so tired, so goddamned tired, and he ran and he fought and he tries so hard to belong somewhere but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t fucking matter because now it is time to sink, time to disappear.

‘Stop!’ screams Hinata, a million miles away. ‘Stop! You’re not Seelie, you don’t have a reason to hurt him!’

Far above, beyond the waters that close in above Kageyama’s head, Oikawa laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

\---

‘ **We should probably text Daichi** ,’ the largest dog sighs irritatedly. ‘ **He’s going to kill us. But we should text him.** ’

The second dog halts in its dragging of the remnants of the corpse and yips, high and indignant. ‘ **Are you crazy?** ’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ says a cool, crystal-clear voice. ‘I’ve already called Daichi.’

The shadows beneath the sycamore split apart, and a not-woman climbs out from its inky depths. Her skin is the color of silver moonlight marked only with a single beauty spot by her eye, and her hair dark as a crow’s feather, and her eyes are blank and milky white. Everything about her face, her features, her strong and lithe body looks dangerous, sharp, _deadly_. Even though she is beautiful, and intoxicatingly so, there is something about the way her lips curve that speaks of fathomless depths and watery graves, and sailors’ bones bleaching on sharp rocks.

She blinks, and suddenly her eyes resemble a human’s again, dark and enchanting. She shakes out her long dark hair and pulls a pair of rectangular glasses out of her jacket pocket.  She is still wearing a skintight black dress, thick black leggings, knee-high boots, and a gleaming leather jacket with red roses stitched into the back, the same thing she had been wearing when the Hunt’s victim ran to her for help. The dogs crowd around her thighs, rubbing against her legs and murmuring whimpers of delight. She lets her hands fall against their dark coats.

Her laughter is the soft ripple of water falling in a cave, crystalline and bright.

‘ **Shimizu!** ’ cries the second dog, its tail wagging. ‘ **I’m** **_so_ ** **glad you came to watch me today. Aren’t I so awesome? Did you see the way I climbed up the roof and surprised him? I’m the best!** ’ It presses its nose into her waist and barks excitedly as she scratches its head fondly.

‘ **Shut up, Tanaka** ’ the third dog chimes in, nudging the second dog aside with its great black body. ‘ **Shimizu is here to see** **_me_ ** **. Aren’t you?** ’ Red eyes twinkle up hopefully at the siren.

The siren folds her arms over her chest. ‘I’m here to watch all of you,’ she responds pleasantly. She smiles encouragingly at the largest dog. ‘Even you, Asahi.’

The largest dog wags its tail once. Its tongue lolls to the side of its mouth, gleaming red against its crowfeather fur.

She frowns disapprovingly at the corpse the dogs are dragging away from the groundskeeper’s old house. ‘Well isn’t that disgusting?’ she remarks, nodding at the pile of bones and loose flesh. ‘I can get rid of that for you, if you go ahead and meet the others at the bar.’

‘ **Thanks, Shimizu,** ’ the largest dog sighs. ‘ **I owe you one.** ’

The siren waves him off with a laugh. ‘Oh, just buy me a drink when I get there,’ she smiles. ‘It’s not like I haven’t gotten rid of bodies before.’ Her smile grows sharp and wicked and full of jagged teeth, like a shark’s mouth rearing beneath a roaring wave.

As the dogs bound off into the night, the siren kneels by the corpse. The air stinks of clotting blood and fresh meat ripped from bone. She narrows her eyes as she studies the state of the Hunt’s first victim, and nods to herself. This is not exactly her first year watching the Hunt, but this is the first time she has been hopeful for its killings.

Shimizu is old, as old as the hills and the rivers that run deep beneath. She once lived in the black, silent lake, before the humans filled it up with dirt and concrete and built towers and apartments above it and polluted all other ponds with their plastic and their sewage and their iron and their chemicals. So the siren left the water and walks where men come to women willingly with pockets full of riches and a bellyfull of unquenchable hunger. Some kinds of hunger are worse than others. Some men only want love, a voice to sing to them in the lonely night, a pair of arms to keep them warm. These are the kinds she treasures before she kills softly and sweetly, lulled to sleep by her sirensong. But there are other kinds, full of sickness and broken things.

This corpse was once such a man with a terrible, evil hunger. She lost a sister to him before, five years ago, and has carried that grudge with her ever since.

She smiles viciously. The death-debt is repaid. Her sister is avenged.

The siren rises to her feet. She waves her hand over the corpse. The soil of the graveyard opens up and swallows it down, down into the Court Under the Hill. It shall lie among the bones of other humans taken for the Hunt, and the life that was taken shall be forgotten and wiped from existence.

By the time the last of the bones sink into the earth, and the topsoil closes up above it, the siren is gone.

The graveyard is silent. The sycamore stands watch, its bark painted by the red of the moon.

\---

Kuroo stares past the creepy ladybug statue, scratching his head in amazement. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he whistles.

The blond fairy, the adorable gorgeous long-limbed creature that Kuroo has been fucking _obsessed_ with since he saw him in the bar, is pressing his fingertips against a fallen pine log at the roots of a mammoth oak tree. In the day, the oak tree never looks this fucking big.

Kuroo is pretty old, by goblin standards. He has been alive for a while. Maybe not as long as the other trooping knights who served with him, and moved onto delightful revelries after their time hunting and killing Unseelie was done, but still. Kuroo is old. He knows both goblin magic and Seelie magic. He even knows a fair amount of magic that the other Courts use, because he likes to know things.

But he knows nothing about the Old Ways, the ways of the Fair Folk that came before the four Courts.

Tsukishima does, though. He sings quietly as he kneels before the fallen pine and the towering oak, and in the bloody moonlight the tree stretches above him until it is big enough to swallow worlds within its roots. The magic slips from his body, invisible and yet overpowering. The scent of fertile soil sinks into Kuroo’s pores and reminds him of the burrows of the Goblin King, where he grew up and played as a child. He smells lightning upon the air, and feels a different wind, a wind that carries a song about bones and rivers and lakes and molten currents beneath the earth. It is Old, older than the four Courts. It belongs to the Court with No Name, the Court that Came Before.

Kuroo suddenly wonders who the fuck this blond fairy is.

Tsukishima pulls a small silver-edged knife from the ground. He presses it to his lips.

‘Standing oak and fallen pine,’ he whispers. ‘Blood moon and moon blood. Gold throne and silver  blade. I offer you these gifts, Old Mother.’

He draws the edge of the blade across his hand, and with his blood, his ruby-bright blood that shines with light so bright it hurts to look at for too long, he draws a large symbol onto the bark of the oak tree.

‘Old Mother,’ Tsukishima calls. ‘Blood of my blood, bone of my bone, come to me. Mother of my mother, Kin of my father, come to me.’ He taps the hilt of his knife, his elven-made knife, against the roots of the oak trees. He taps it once, twice, thrice.

Kuroo looks on, because if he looks away the magic might disappear and so will Tsukishima, and that would break his fucking heart because he has never seen anything so goddamned beautiful. Fuck the trooping knights, fuck the order of things, fuck this never-ending war between Queens, fuck the Hunt and fuck the Fair Folk.

Kuroo wants Tsukishima. He wants so savagely it burns in his lungs like liquid iron. It burns like poison. It burns so fucking fantastically he never wants to stop burning.

Isn’t it true that if you watch something for too long, you start to covet it? He remembers sitting in the bar, fully intending to get utterly blind drunk with his friends before the Hunt started, and having his beer-induced buzz wiped completely clean by a rush of strange power from across the room. He looked up across the way and there he was: this beautiful, slender, tall creature with hair curling like gold and eyes that shone like sunlight on rippling water, with magic thick and heavy leaking from every pore even as he struggled to keep his glamor intact. Kuroo wanted to take him apart. He wanted to peel off that disguise and see exactly what bones and flesh lay underneath. He loves puzzles, he always has, and this was so delicious he could almost taste it.

He hadn’t really meant to threaten the Crow. Not really. But he can’t help himself sometimes. He’s a goblin, and goblins are wicked by nature, so really he was just acting the way he was born to behave. You tease, you play, you pinch, then you tear them apart piece by piece until there is nothing left but bone. In all honesty, Kuroo thinks the distinction between Seelie and Unseelie is an utter fabrication, because servants of both Courts are cruel, playful, deceptive, and vicious. He knows he is as much of a bloodthirsty motherfucker as any Crow can be, and maybe in a different life he would have been on the other side of the war, but this is where he stands, and this is where Tsukishima stands, with a great fucking rift between the two of them.

Isn’t it true that if you are forbidden for having something, you want it even twice as much? Kenma certainly wants his Crow changeling more than he admits. Kuroo used to laugh and tease, but now those barbed words come back to sink their sharp edges into his own heart, because he looks at Tsukishima under the hungry light of the Hunt moon and he forgets everything he thought about in that bar, when he teased his prey.

Tsukishima stands, lifting the knife to the air, to the sky and to the falling snow. Then he drops the knife to the ground, and the ground swallows it up like a hungry stomach, and accepts the offering. The roots of the oak peel apart, twisting like the great bodies of giant serpents, and maybe they are serpents after all, because this night is getting weirder and weirder by every fucking moment. The soil falls away from beneath the oak, and up from the hollow cavern climbs a woman made of marble and ebony.

Her eyes glimmer like opals in her grey face, reflecting the blood red of the moon. She holds Tsukishima’s offered knife in her hand, and in the other, she holds a longer, more wicked blade made of sharpened bone, wrapped with cruel silver thorns. She wears a crown of bones and roses, and her hair hangs long and heavy like solid gold over her ebony body and her marble limbs. Her lips are blacker than jet, and when she opens her mouth, her teeth are sharp and made of diamonds. Her voice is the sound of earthquakes rumbling in the base of mountains.

‘What precious gifts you bring to me, little gold prince,’ says the Old Mother. Her smile is beautiful, and in that beauty there is much to be feared. ‘What do you want for these precious gifts?’

Tsukishima stands with his feet shoulder’s width apart. Defensive. Protective. He is wearing the garb of a Shield Crow even as his skin gleams with the same pearly sheen as the hilt of his gifted knife. He plays at being human. He plays at being Unseelie. He plays at being less and less than he really is.

‘Old Mother, I ask you for what I cannot find myself,’ says Tsukishima. He sounds as though he is reciting part of a poem or a song. ‘I ask you for the knowledge which you keep.’

The Old Mother shakes her head. Her hair sings as it shakes behind her. ‘Your gifts are not suitable,’ she says decidedly.

Tsukishima looks panicked. ‘Are they not enough?’

The Old Mother laughs. It rumbles like the sound of trees creaking in a storm, and the sound of rain thundering onto dry ground. ‘No, little gold prince,’ she smiles. There is a kindness in her voice, if the great movement of the earth can be considered kind. ‘They are too much. Take back your golden throne and your silver knife. They are yours. The throne of my sons and their sons has sat empty and unused for too long. Take your silver knife and sit upon your golden throne. Take what is yours, little gold prince.’

Something in Tsukishima’s face looks both hard and broken at the same time. Like fragments of a statue, toppled and scattered in the sand. ‘Our time has long since passed, Old Mother,’ he says. ‘There is a price now for you and I to pretend we are what we once were.’ He takes the knife from the creature of stone and gold and bone. ‘But I thank you for your kindness.’

The Old Mother smiles at him. ‘I am always kind to the blood of my blood.’ She spreads her hands, lifting her bone-knife to the sky. The silver thorns glint cruelly. ‘Now, ask what you came to ask me.’

Tsukishima nods. ‘Someone broke the Ancient Order,’ says the blond fairy. ‘Who was it? What did they do? How do I fix it?’

The Old Mother claps her hands, once, twice, thrice. ‘Three questions, little gold prince,’ she says, as if approving. ‘It is good you still know the Old Ways. Your Kin would be proud.’ She extends her hand over the fallen pine, past Tsukishima, who is still knelt before her, and points straight at Kuroo’s chest.

Kuroo is about ready to shit himself, at this point.

‘I am fond of strange and broken things,’ says the Old Mother. ‘I am fond of fixing strange and broken things. For the price of three questions, I ask for three things.’ She beckons to Kuroo. ‘First, I ask for the scale from a goblin’s hide. Second, I ask for the hair of a golden prince of the Court of the Sun. Third, I ask for a kiss, given true and free from sun to shadow.’

Tsukishima glowers. ‘That’s a bit much to ask,’ he grumbles.

‘I do not ask for what you will not willingly give, little gold prince,’ laughs the Old Mother. She opens her palm, awaiting her gifts.

Tsukishima sighs deeply and tiredly. In one smooth motion, he rises and stands, suddenly towering over the Old Mother. He beckons Kuroo over. ‘Come on then,’ he says. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

Kuroo walks up to him. ‘Scale of a goblin?’ he asks, tapping his finger on his collarbone. He has no idea how the Old Mother knows he is a goblin since there is no one, absolutely _no one_ , better at glamor than Kuroo Tetsurou. But it seems as though there is older magic at play than either he or Tsukki is familiar with, so he complies.

He drops the shape of his glamor to reveal his true self just beneath his chin, feels his skin grow hard and flinty, and plucks a scale from beneath his chin. Grey, dull, and mostly boring. Goblins are not terribly exciting to look at, but at least he can hide his horns with some creative hair styling. He drops his scale into Tsukishima’s hand, glancing up at the Old Mother.

She curves her lips upwards into a knowing smile. Of course she knows what it means for a goblin to give someone a scale. But Kuroo is certain that Tsukishima has no idea what this means. Of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t even hesitate before he inspects the scale, and drops it into the Old Mother’s hand.

Tsukishima plucks a strand of hair from his head. The strand shifts from blond to gold as soon as it settles on the Old Mother’s grey hand. ‘And there’s your hair,’ he tells her.

She smiles at him, diamonds sparkling in her mouth. ‘And the kiss,’ she reminds him.

Tsukishima clicks his tongue in annoyance. He looks up at the blood moon, then down at the the silver-edged knife in his hand. He looks up into Kuroo’s eyes and something pained sits there in his expression, behind that carefully balanced mask of indifference. Kuroo knows a lot about masks, since he wears one every day as he rides with his noble-born companions, pretending to be something other than the grey-scaled, dark-horned creature he really is. It is like he is staring into his reflection in a dark pool, except it has all been turned inside out, upside down, pulled from black and grey to gold and pearl, sun and shadow.

‘I’m sorry,’ says the Crow who is not a Crow at all. He pulls Kuroo close by the back of his neck and kisses him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More characters, oh man!


	6. An Unraveling of Woe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A kiss, a gathering, a secret, and an exchange between prisoners of neighboring cages.

Kuroo’s lips are cool, and his teeth are hooked and sharp. He tastes like cool rock and underground springs, like the quiet that waits behind waterfalls and the earth soft and pliant after the rain. But his hands are hot as they slip over Tsukishima’s cheeks, past his jawline and down to settle, firm and gentle, on the nape of his neck and against the base of his skull. He feels the hard flat press of Kuroo’s body move in against him.

Tsukishima’s hands move almost of their own accord, tangling in the Seelie fairy’s hair. And there, there amidst the soft, wild, jet-black hair, he feels his palms press against the cold curve of horns.

‘Oh,’ he gasps. ‘Oh.’

Kuroo laughs into his mouth. His magic dances shamelessly on his tongue as he dips in, _tastes_ Tsukishima, presses his thumbs into the sharp curves of Tsukishima’s hips and gets closer, closer than anyone has ever been allowed to get. He strokes the side of Tsukishima’s neck and traces words into his skin, prints a million promises that Tsukishima can no longer reject, because he wants and he wants and he wants and he wants, just this once, to be able to have this moment in sweet shadow.

He just wants to have something, anything.

Something comes unbound inside Tsukishima, deep within his chest where he has crafted a thicket of thorns to keep himself safe. He drags his fingers down over the glorious shape of the goblin’s horns, he pushes forward, and with a single sigh, gives in. He can feel Kuroo’s pulse in the tremor of his kisses, fervent and desperate. He knows the goblin’s deep-earth magic the way he knows the gold luminescence of his own magic, he can draw all of it into himself and push all of his own magic into the goblin, he can give and give and give and, oh, he wants to give. He wants to drop to his knees and worship Kuroo’s hands and his fingertips, his palms, his wrists, the tiny scars on his forearms from battles and minor skirmishes, he wants to unfold every last inch of this handsome, intoxicating creature. He wants to forget the ghosts that haunt him.

And Kuroo, Kuroo gives him everything he has ever hungered for, and more, in just this one kiss.

But kisses cannot last forever, and they draw apart, breathing heavily. Kuroo traces the shape of Tsukishima’s cheekbones and his lips. Tsukishima cannot bear to keep his eyes open. The glow is fading, and the cruel red gloom of the bloodmoon drags him back to painful reality.

The world is not made of wishes, passionate kisses, and dreams. It is made of Seelie and Unseelie and restrictions and rules and war. But now Tsukishima knows what the other place feels like, what this other forbidden sanctuary is, and he suddenly understands why his brother made that horrible mistake all those centuries ago.

It breaks his heart, it breaks his scarred, broken-again heart, and he wants to scream or cry or run. But he is not allowed to do what he wants, he is not allowed to feel or to love or to want or to give, and this one kiss, true and free, is the exception. And it is done. So Tsukishima clamps down on the ragged tearing in his lungs, he smiles thinly at Kuroo, and turns his back on the goblin so he will not have to watch the confusion turn into disgust.

‘Old Mother,’ Tsukishima forces through gritted teeth.

_Focus. Remember. Remember. You idiot, remember._

The Old Mother’s opalescent eyes are radiant and sad, if cold, hard rock is capable of displaying sadness. Liquid silver tears track down her marble cheeks. ‘Oh, my poor child,’ she whispers. ‘Do not fight it.’

Tsukishima squares his jaw. ‘The world has changed, Old Mother,’ he says quietly. His voice is steady. The world is full of small mercies, he thinks. ‘There are things I will never be able to have. There are things I will never be able to do.’

Behind him, Kuroo says something quiet under his breath, but it is stolen by the gentle sweep of the wind.

The Old Mother nods. ‘You have given me the three gifts I asked for,’ the Old Mother says. ‘And for this, I give you three boons in return.’

Then she speaks, and answers the three questions Tsukishima asked. And he stands and listens, and horror fills his blood with ice. When she has finally finished, he turns back to Kuroo.

‘We need to go,’ he says. ‘Right now. We’re all in danger. All of us.’

\---

‘You **WHAT?** ’ Daichi roars, slamming his hand down on the bar so hard the glasses rattle all along the hardwood surface.

‘Mind your temper,’ Sugawara says mildly, resting a pale hand on Daichi’s arm. ‘Although, quite frankly, you three, that was very, very shitty of you,’ he adds, his frown deepening. He gives the three men standing in front of him a disapproving look. ‘I expected better of you three. How many Hunts have you been on?’

The Hounds of the Hunt shift uncomfortably and look down at their feet. When they ran across the streets in pursuit of their prey, there was barely anything different about them in appearance or thought. They were one with the Hunt and one with each other, all dark fur and fang and deep burning hunger, pushed onwards by the howl-song. But here, shifted back to their original form, they are separate from the Hunt and separate from each other, and therefore utterly defenseless against their leader’s onslaught of rage.

The tallest one, his long scraggly hair tied up in what is probably meant to be a neat bun but instead is a mild disaster, lifts his hands up in defeat.

‘I, I just don’t know, Suga,’ he says mournfully. ‘I wish I knew where they went, but I just don’t know.’

‘Well, you _should_ know,’ barks Daichi. He sighs in a harsh, expulsion of air. ‘You should have been taking care of them. You know better than this.’ His anger seems to have tapered off into exasperation at this point.

‘You were supposed to oversee all the new members,’ Sugawara reprimands. He shakes his head. ‘If I hadn’t found Yamaguchi wandering around in the park, what do you think would have happened to him?’ He waves his hand at the boy in question, who is currently sitting in one of the booths with a thick woolen blanket fastened around his shoulders.

‘I’m fine,’ pipes up Yamaguchi, waving his hand and smiling bravely, despite the fact that there is a large purpling bruise over his cheek and a nasty cut on his lip. His face is completely ashen underneath his spattering of freckles, and there are long ugly scratches on his arms. He had run across a particularly angry pixie who was performing a glamor spell which wasn’t working, and when he tried to help the pixie out he had been awarded for his efforts with a serious thrashing.

‘You are not fine!’ shouts Daichi in exasperation. ‘Look at your arms! Look at you! You broke three ribs!’ He runs his hands through his hair until the short locks stand up in all directions. ‘From a _pixie,_ ’ he adds. ‘From a fucking _pixie_.’

‘ _I’m_ a pixie,’ protests the shortest of the three Hounds. ‘I’m perfectly capable of inflicting damage.’

‘That really isn’t the point, Noya,’ sighs Sugawara. ‘The point is,  if we do not take care of our own, then we may as well hand over our younglings to the Seelie and wait for their slaughter.’

The Hound called Asahi looks as though he is about to cry.

‘We offer safety and support to these children,’ Sugawara continues, his voice quiet and his expression deeply pained. ‘If we cannot give them that much, how can we call ourselves a Court?’

Just as Asahi is about to burst into hot, shameful tears, the door to the bar opens and a familiar blond fairy steps through, brushing snow carefully off his jacket shoulders. He frowns across the bar, at where Yamaguchi is still curled up in thick blankets, and folds his arms over his chest. The door swings shut behind him with a light squeak. He takes in the collected Hounds, still standing in congregation before Daichi and his mage Pair, and the other fairies sat scattered around the booths quietly watching everything unfold. His gaze travels back to Yamaguchi, who beams at him.

‘What happened to you?’ Tsukishima asks his childhood friend, with no small amount of incredulity in his voice.

Yamaguchi smiles sheepishly. ‘You mean these?’ he asks, pointing at his wounds. ‘Um, it was a pixie.’

Tsukishima’s arches an eyebrow. ‘A pixie.’ He looks less than impressed.

Yamaguchi shrugs. ‘I never said I was any good at this Hunt stuff when I joined.’

The blond fairy considers this for a moment, then nods. ‘That’s true,’ he admits. He glances at the other assembled fairies. ‘Have you seen the freaky duo? There is something I need to tell you all and I don’t want to repeat myself.’

‘That’s precisely our problem, Kei,’ Daichi says. His eyes are clear now, having shaken off the remaining rage, left only with concern for his troops. ‘We have no idea where Kageyama and Hinata are.’ He shakes his head, his dark eyebrows knitting. ‘Do you have any idea where they could be?’

Tsukishima narrows his eyes. He shares a brief look with Yamaguchi. Something passes between them, undecipherable and urgent. ‘I can search for them,’ he says quietly. ‘If they are still within the city’s borders and the moon is still in the sky, I can find them.’

Something about him suddenly becomes sharper around the edges, as though someone has drawn around his shape with a dark marker. His eyes shift into a brighter shade of gold as his glamor begins to waver thin. His hair is no longer its sandy shade of wheat, but gleams like solid spun gold against his skin. When he speaks again, his needle-sharp teeth flash dangerously in the warm lights.

‘I can feel them,’ he says. His voice is deep and echoing, like the distant sound of a church bell ringing through a thick mist. ‘They are in danger. The Ancient Order is broken tonight, and the Courts no longer hold peace between each other. We are in danger. The bloodling lies bleeding by the point of the river and the bones of the human city. He does not have long to live.’

Then he blinks, and the gold does not shine so bright, and the cruel edges of his face blend out again.

Yamaguchi lets out a breath and presses his wounded hands against his chest. ‘There it is,’ he whispers to himself. _Akiteru would be so proud, to see his brother stand so tall, so magnificent._

The rest of the bar’s occupants, however, are staring at him half in awe, half in shock.

‘How did you find-’ starts Daichi, but Sugawara cuts him off with a quick wave of his hand.

‘Oh hush, Sawamura,’ the silver-haired mage sighs. He fastens his focus on Tsukishima. ‘If I wind-ride us there, do you think you can deal with whatever Seelie fairy is attacking them?’

Tsukishima’s face grows hard. ‘That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you all about,’ he says gravely. ‘It isn’t the Seelie that we have to be worried about anymore. And it wasn’t a Seelie knight who attacked Kageyama.’ He clicks his tongue in irritation at himself. The words do not come easily to him, for something old in his blood sticks in his throat, demanding that he speak the language of his Kin. But no one here understands that dead tongue. ‘I don’t have time to explain right now. Kageyama needs our help.’

Daichi hardens his jaw and nods his head at that point. ‘Right,’ he agrees. He settles his hand on his Pair’s shoulder, his face softening with concern. ‘Will you be alright Pairing with Kei?’

The silver-haired mage only smiles softly. His eyes are ancient in his youthful face, like the deep grooves of a tree long overgrown with moss and vines, eyes that have centuries come and go, civilisations rise and fall in the ages. He is terrifying for it. ‘We’ve Paired before,’ he says quietly, only loud enough for Daichi to hear. ‘A long, long time ago.’ He looks away from Daichi to where Tsukishima is standing expectantly. ‘We’ll be just fine.’

‘I’ll keep you updated,’ Tsukishima intercepts, pulling his phone out of his jacket pocket and holding it up in illustration. He looks over at Yamaguchi, making sure that his friend is warm and safe, before gesturing for Sugawara to join him.

The mage pulls on his dark, fur-collared coat and fastens it tight at his waist. As he joins Tsukishima in the doorway, he looks over his shoulder back at the three Hounds who are still standing to attention in front of Daichi.

‘Asahi. Tanaka. Noshinoya.’ The mage’s soft smile drops from his face. ‘I don’t want you three ever to pull this sort of thing again,’ he says. His voice is still smooth, but there is something hard and dangerous in his voice. ‘I won’t forgive you so easily next time.’

Asahi whimpers like a dog that has been kicked hard in the ribs.

They all know that Sugawara was the one that found Kageyama bleeding and half-starved to death in a snow-dusted alleyway. He was the one that gathered the skinny mage-child up and took him home, cleaned him up and treated his wounds and gave him food to eat, and told him that it would be alright from now on, that nobody would ever hurt him again, that he would be safe here with the Unseelie fairies. He would never have to bleed again, Sugawara told him. He would be safe with the Crows.

Sugawara hates nothing more than being made a liar.

And they made a liar out of Sugawara, because Kageyama is out there in the cold winter night, and he might be dead already.

\---

Tobio Kageyama is born in the shadow of a towering mountain, in the longest night of the year. When he is born, the wicker-witches gather around his wriggling body and count the blue-black crowfeathers sprouting from his white little belly. It is a good number, and for it, they bless Kageyama’s mother for bringing another magic-bearer into the valley, even if the father is not one of their coven. Magic is precious in these parts. The wicker-witches celebrate any and all kinds of magics, for the world is shrinking and drying up so swiftly.

But Tobio’s magic is too fast for the wicker-witches. It whips out like lightning and strikes right through their hands, leaving behind singe-marks and bloodied holes in the wind-witches’s palms. They cross their fingers over their foreheads and tell him he is cursed, that his father is a skinwalker, a demon, a creature that only wants to hurt and consume and destroy. They hang flowers around his neck and tie strings around his wrists and ankles to try and push the evil magic out of him. The flowers rot and fall off. The strings turn to glass and shatter when they fall on the ground.

Tobio is only thirteen when he is asked to leave the valley. His mother weeps and begs and pleads, but Tobio knows she must be secretly happy he is leaving her.

He travels for years, walking in the shadows between the human world and the world of the Fair Folk. He learns how to scavenge in order to survive. He finds out that he is fascinatingly good at imitating the sounds of birds and beasts, so he can draw them into traps and feed off their corpses. He knows that he can imitate other sounds too, like children screaming and mothers calling. It is with this awful talent that he lures a little boy, perhaps seven, six years old, into the woods. He does not know what he is doing until the boy is already lost, and so he has to spend a few hours guiding the human boy back to civilisation. He understands the danger of this gift-curse, and so he swears under a thick blood-moon never to make the same mistake again. He knows that power like his always comes with a price. He is waiting for that price to catch up to him.

He can feel his father’s cursed blood ringing in his veins. His mother’s lightning witch-magic does nothing to tamper it; in fact, it only feeds it and makes it grow stronger. He is only thankful that there is no hunger or malice in his personality but for the destruction that already lives inside his magic. Sometimes he feels as though it doesn’t even belong to him, that he is merely a vessel for the magic to host until it is done with him.

He eventually finds the place where the Fair Folk hold their court, between city and forest. He seeks out the Spring Court first. He knows there are many like him there, bloodlings who are half in shadow and half in light, and yet never able to step fully into either world. He thinks he will be welcome there.

He is wrong.

There is a witch there already, a mage sitting beside the King of the Spring Court, with flowers woven into his tousled hair and jewels upon his fingers, and he is champion of his people, for he is beautiful in the most radiant way and everyone around him loves him. He weaves delicate charms and presents all the courtiers with presents made of shimmering spells and charms. Tobio has never been more bedazzled in his short, brutal life. But when he pleads with the champion, the champion only laughs at him mockingly and challenges him to a duel.

Witch and witch.

Mage and mage.

Tobio does not know better. He does not know to say no, to beg forgiveness, to shower the champion with praises and flowers and gifts, for this is the way of the Spring Court. Tobio is made from horrible things with broken bones and black inky blood. He only knows how to trick, how to take, how to mimic living things with warm pulses only so he can keep pushing on in the great wasteland of his existence. Fighting is what he is good at.

So he fights the champion. And he almost wins, with his whipcrack loops of magic and his flurry of knives and arrows of animal bone. He towers above the champion, who bleeds from his hundred wounds, and feels his father’s blood scream in his blood, angry and vengeful and unstoppable. He feels powerful. He feels endless.

There is a price for this sort of power. And the price is this: the champion calls Tobio’s name, his full name, the name given to him from the moment he opened his eyes to the world and gave his first cry.

Tobio’s ribs crack open and he bleeds inky black blood. He only has enough time to crawl out of the Court of the Spring King before he disintegrates into rot and putrid tatters. As he stumbles out of the warmth of the Court and into the snow, he hears the laughter of the fairies behind him, mocking and sharp and sweet.

_You’re better off dead._

_You’re better off human._

Tobio flees to the humans. They have homes that open to vagrants, to lost and broken people. He tries to stay there for a while, tries to dampen his cruel edges and swallow down his powers, tries not to look all wrong, like a demon trying to wear a human’s likeness. He cannot keep it up for very long, but in that brief reprieve,  Tobio finds an old paperback book, spine cracked and pages yellowed. It tells horrible, frightening stories about creatures that steal faces and voices, eat people from the inside out, plant curses in their bodies and laugh at their demise. This, this monstrous thing, this evil, awful thing is where Tobio comes from. His power comes from the deaths of hundreds, perhaps even thousands.

Tobio reads about fear. He reads about how his father’s kind may be killed ( _call their name, their true name_ ) and he wonders if he can be killed the same way, or if it only takes a bullet to the brain and a sword to the throat, the way it would do for his mother’s kin.

In his darkest moments, when he is starving in the dark alleyways of the city, he wishes his mother had burned him to death when he was just a baby, before he was old enough to do any harm. He wishes he had never been born.

But he finds his place, in the end. He finds warmth and love and acceptance, which he doesn’t need, of course, because Tobio knows how not to need anything, but, fuck doesn’t it feel good to just _belong_ somewhere? To feel part of something greater than you, to feel a sense of purpose, to be bound by loyalty to a cause?

Tobio exists now to serve Hinata. To serve the Hunt. To be a good Pair to Hinata and anyone else who will have him. He is happy. He is so, so fucking happy, happy the way he has never been since he learned how to cast his first spell.

But there is a price for this sort of happiness.

And the price is this:

Tobio lies on the pebbles by the river, and the world grows cold and grey. The snow is beautiful above him but it stains inky black as soon as it touches his blood. It is the end, but at least the river has come to take him away, down the river and to the endless plains where bison once rolled over the concaves over the land like an endless flood of hot breath and life. Maybe he will belong there again.

\---

Tsukishima prides himself on having excellent focus. If he does not pinpoint his entire focus on something, then he is excellent at compartmentalizing. Any pain, any distress, any background noise can be stored away in the back of his mind to be processed later when he is in the confines of his apartment, where the fairies cannot find him and the humans leave him be. He knows how to stay clipped and small and limited, like a tree carefully pruned to a pleasing shape.

You do not pull the teeth from a snake’s mouth if the snake does not bite.

But he bit. He pulled off his dull edges and his indifference and he forgot his fear and the snake remembered how to be a snake again, and he made a bargain with the Old Mother and gave a strand of his hair and took a kiss, then another, and then another until he was gasping and his mind was whirling and he was son of the King of the Court of the Sun again, son of the Queen of the Court of the Moon, heir to the golden throne and wielder of silver-edged swords, and he remembered what it was to have the land bend to his will. He feels his magic course through his veins. It pounds in his temples and thunders in his heart. What was a mere trickle before is an entire ocean growing within him and he is fucking _drunk_ on it.

But more than that, more than the power thrumming thick and hot in his veins, he is drowning in the memory of that kiss. _Given true and free_. Taken hungry and desperate.

Hands upon skin, hands under clothes, hands on lips and lips on lips and far more than what was asked for by the bargain. And yet. And yet. He asked and Kuroo gave and he asked for more and Kuroo still gave and he forgot how to control himself.

He knows he must focus on the threads of magic that bind him to Sugawara. He knows he must guide them to where Kageyama is lying by the riverbed, deeply injured and as close to dying as one of the Fair Folk ever will be. He knows he must give every last piece of him to this wind-riding spell or it will not work.

And yet he is burning, burning, burning with the memory of it.

A delicate cough draws him out of his reverie. Tsukishima blinks stupidly at Sugawara as he pulls another thread of silvery magic around Tsukishima’s wrist and weaves it into the elaborate knot floating delicately between them.

‘You know,’ the silver-haired mage remarks, ‘I can read your thoughts when I’m doing this.’ He gestures with a free hand at the spell-knot. ‘All of them.’

Tsukishima’s face burns with shame. Panic floods his system.

Sugawara laughs lightly. He pats Tsukishima’s knuckles reassuringly. ‘Oh, don’t spazz out,’ he says, almost teasingly. He loops another thread through the spell-knot and pulls it tight. ‘I won’t tell anyone. Why on earth would I betray my Queen’s only surviving son?’

Tsukishima stiffens. ‘The Unseelie Queen has no children.’

Sugawara scrunches his face up blatant disgust. ‘I do not speak of our false queen on her stolen throne and her stupid, childish war,’ he says. His voice is still light and sweet, but his words have changed. They both know he is no ordinary mage, and they both know the price of acting like anything but ordinary. ‘I speak of our Queen of the Old Court. I speak of the Old Ways, the only true Ways.’

‘The Old Ways are dead,’ Tsukishima says firmly.

Sugawara draws his finger over his spell and nods, seemingly satisfied with his handiwork. ‘The Old Ways are not dead, you know,’ he tells Tsukishima, not unkindly. ‘As long as the blood of the sun and the blood of the moon run in our veins, our Courts are alive.’

‘Our Court is the Court Under the Hill,’ Tsukishima states curtly. ‘There is no other Court we may swear fealty to.’ He rubs his hand over his forearm, where the strings of the thread are tied, where the moon-shaped scars burn ugly and pink in his flesh from where hot iron brands were pressed over, and over, and over into his skin. _Remember, remember, remember._ ‘And the Old Ways died the same day as Akiteru, and by the same hands that took him’

‘Oh, Kei,’ says Sugawara, his eyes glittering and sad and full of kindred-sorrow. He presses his fingertips against one of the silver scars on Tsukishima’s arm. Cool, apologetic magic kisses his damaged flesh. ‘You cannot wear this noose about your neck until the end of days.’

Tsukishima laughs, harsh and loud. ‘Do I really have any other choice?’ he says. His teeth are sharp and his cheeks full of poison and he is a beast, a monster, a pile of living ash with no branches in which he may roost. ‘Anyways, we don’t have time for this right now. Kageyama needs us.’

Sugawara’s face is astonishingly breathtaking under the light of the moon. His beauty mark gleams like obsidian under his left eye. If you look close enough, just close enough to hear the mage’s heart beat slow in his chest, you can see that the mark is, in fact, stone, and his skin marble, and only the hair sitting upon his brow is soft and alive. For it is always the way, that the children of the Court of the Moon eventually become cold rock like their namesake. Their beauty is only a way of making amends for their nature.

Sugawara draws his palm over the intricate knotwork of the spell, and speaks three words that are swept away and stolen by the swift icy breeze sweeping past them. The wind considers the offering, then accepts, and they hurtle away into the wind to where the river bends against the city, and where a Crow lies fragile and broken.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, you get to know what the Old Mother said.  
> But only after everything goes pear-shaped. *evil laugh*


	7. A Broken Bloodmoon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hinata seeks revenge.

It takes them mere moments to reach Kageyama and Hinata, at the place by the river where pebbles are washed ashore and the old ruins of the city stand in the shadow of the bridge. Barely a breath. Barely enough time to blink.

But it is enough time for Kageyama’s human-born heart to stop beating. Enough time for Hinata to feel the last strains of life fade from his Pair’s body, for the changeling to scream brokenly into the night, for the bloodmoon to crack from the strain, for the sky to shiver from its wounds and for all the stars to wink out from sigh. Enough time for Hinata to lose grip on his single, solid form, enough time for his skin to ripple like the surface of a disturbed well, for the beast hiding within to rear its ugly head from those dark depths, for it to tear out of Hinata’s skin and charge, oil-slick black, into the night.

\---

Sugawara lands delicately on his feet, barely disturbing the pebbles underfoot. Tsukishima is only a few paces behind him and quickly overtakes him as he dashes to Kageyama’s immobile figure on the beach, skidding onto his knees to rest at the Pair’s side. The tall fairy presses his hand on Kageyama’s chest. He tears away the jacket and rips off the thin t-shirt covering Kageyama’s thin frame. 

Sugawara hears Tsukishima’s loud curse before he reaches the fallen mage.

‘It’s bad,’ Tsukishima warns, lifting a hand to halt Sugawara’s approach. ‘Really bad.’ 

He knows what is coming, but the sight of it hits him like a thousand knives in his stomach nonetheless. The young mage lies face-up, his eyes closed and his lips slightly parted, frothy blood drawing marbled patterns on his cheeks and chin. His bare chest is completely crushed, like a tin can crumpled up and discarded. White bone protrudes from broken skin, and blood gurgles sluggishly from the ugly wounds. His skin makes sick, squelching noises as it falls right off his flesh.

‘What the fuck,’ Sugawara hisses, covering his mouth.

Tsukishima’s face is carefully blank. ‘Skinwalker.’

‘ _ What? _ ’ Sugawara exclaims, backing away from the young mage’s ruined body.

The blond fairy rises to his feet. ‘Skinwalker,’ he repeats, louder this time. ‘Kageyama is a skinwalker. It’s why his magic is the way it is. He isn’t dying because of his wounds - mages recover from much worse. It’s because someone knew his name, his true name. For us,’ he explains, his voice quick and his words efficient, ‘a true name compels us to another’s will, but for Kageyama, it means death.’

Sugawara kneels by the mage. He pushes his moonlight magic into Kageyama’s skin and tries to thread the ripped pieces of his flesh and bone back together. They stay only momentarily, but the spells refuse to stick and the blood refuses to return to the mage’s body. Tsukishima is right. This is no ordinary curse. Kageyama’s  _ own magic _ is tearing him apart, from the outside in, ripping apart his skin and his flesh and rotting his blood. The wounds on his chest, however, are easier to heal. Someone hurt him, physically, without the clean swipe of a spell or a curse, and this sort of wound is only possible if someone kicks hard enough, from above.

Sugawara feels bile sour in the back of his throat. Someone kicked Kageyama while he was down.  _ Coward. _

‘He needs a sacrifice,’ Tsukishima says. ‘I need to go skin a human and bring the skin back for Kageyama. That’ll heal him up. Keep him alive. Buy me some time.’ He looks up at the moon and his face draws sharp with concern. The moon sits in the sky split into two jagged halves, like pieces of a broken plate, still gleaming like fresh-spilt blood. ‘That’s not a good sign,’ he tells Sugawara, gesturing at the moon.

The silver-haired mage stares up at the broken moon in horror. 

‘What is happening?’ he utters, looking up at Tsukishima.

‘The Ancient Order is broken,’ the elf says gravely. ‘These are the consequences.’ He casts a quick look at Kageyama. ‘I need to hurry. Keep him alive,’ he repeats. He pulls a thin silver-edged knife from his pocket. ‘I’ll be back.’

And with that, Tsukishima dashes off into the deep shadows of the river bank, and is gone.

Sugawara turns back to Kageyama. With the moon broken like this, his magic feels thin and strained. He presses his lips together and tries to push through it. He loops his fingers around each other, weaving the first knots out of the unsteady moonlight, and presses two ends of the threads into Kageyama’s side. Blood trickles over Sugawara’s fingertips and stains them dark. He ignores the sticky liquid as best as he can, and weaves the knot further up across the gaping hole in the unconscious mage’s chest. He pulls more threads from the air, ties them tight, and works his way steadily, slowly, patiently. 

‘Stay with me, Tobio,’ he whispers to the young mage. He presses his hand against Kageyama’s icy forehead. ‘You’ve been through worse than this,’ he lies. ‘You can pull through this.’

The truth is, Sugawara has no idea what horrors the mage has met before. He cannot even pretend to understand. 

Sugawara’s life is a good one. He lives in a shared apartment with Daichi, and he is loved and respected by everyone in the Court Under the Hill. Perhaps there were times before when he was painted indigo with sorrow for the loved ones he lost in the Unseelie Queen’s cruel genocide. Maybe, from time to time, he sits up in the lonely nights in his bedroom and remembers the way he used to dance for his Queen of the Moon Garden, and sometimes he cries so hard he forgets how to breathe, bites into his knuckles until they bleed because sometimes he remembers the wonderful way things  _ were _ and he knows that the Moon Garden he grew up in is empty and full of bones of girls and boys he kissed.

But his life, as it is now, is full of friendship and warmth and laughter. His Hounds love him. His Pair, his captain, his leader, Daichi, loves him. He has food on his plate, wine in his cup, and a warm bed to hold him in the long nights. 

Kageyama has nothing. He still lives in the streets, and even though he tries to tell everyone he has found a home to stay at it is obvious that he wears the same clothes each and every day, and there are suspicious stains on his hoodie. He does not take kindly to charity, and bares his teeth at it like a badly abused dog cowering in a dirty alley. He has no money, no qualifications for a job, and no family in this iron city. Sugawara and Daichi in turn have both told Kageyama that he is welcome to take the empty room in their apartment. But instead he still wanders in the streets. He does not sleep. He barely eats. He watches over Hinata with a fierce protectiveness and he aids whichever member of the Hunt he can, with a determination that both frightens and impresses Sugawara. 

He asks for nothing. He never even complains.

Sugawara grinds the heel of his palm against his eye. ‘Oh, Kageyama,’ he whispers. ‘You have to stop this nonsense.’

He is afraid that Kageyama does not hear him. His heart is beating again, thank all the Old Gods, but it is weak and he has barely any blood left in his body to pump around. If they make it through this awful night, then Sugawara is going to drag this child back home and make sure that he understands, once and for all, what being safe and warm means.

Sugawara binds Kageyama’s wounds shut and begins working on his disintegrating skin. He pulls thicker strands from the icy wind, twists them up Kageyama’s face and folds them over his eyelids. Each flower he weaves out of spell-rope unfolds, blossoms out into silvery petals and floats upward to the broken moon, singing quietly in a feeble attempt to make amends. He is thankful none of the Unseelie courtiers are here to witness this spell.

His mother taught him this spell, a spell to lessen fever, to soothe pain, and to bring love on light moonbeam wings. She taught him many other spells, spells that may be woven at the loom of the Queen of the Moon Garden, but the loom is lost and the gates that were once guarded by the gentle rock-giants are now overgrown with roses and the halls are empty and quiet. Only one of the looms from the Days Before exists now, and it resides in the forbidden halls of the Seelie Court. 

With one of those looms, Sugawara can stop death. He can prevent famine. He can draw patterns that will teach humans where best to plant crops, which parts of the river will reveal jewels and diamonds, which forests house the fattest deer and the slowest rabbits. He can protect houses from fire and rot, and he can promise handsome, rich men for all the daughters in a household. These are the things that his mother used to gift the humans who lived in the shadow of the hill with the standing sycamore. 

With one of those looms, Sugawara knows he can weave Kageyama a cloak that will protect him from being hurt ever again.

‘I wish things were different,’ the silver-haired mage tells Kageyama. ‘If you’d come to me, maybe three hundred years ago, I would have been able to look after you.’ Gently, carefully, as though handling spun glass, he lifts the sticky hair away from Kageyama’s forehead. He looks down at the blood glistening upon the pebbled shore. He presses his forefinger and middle finger to the pulsepoint at Kageyama’s wrist. The young mage’s heart flutters like the wings of a butterfly, wet from the rain. 

It doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look good at all. 

‘I’ll make you a million promises,’ he whispers to Kageyama, which in itself is a promise heavy and true, ‘if you come back to us.’

The threads holding Kageyama’s crushed ribcage together begin to snap. Sugawara unwinds them and begins work on patching up the damaged sections of the spell-knot. Tsukishima has to return soon, or there will be nothing left of Kageyama but blood and bone sinking down to the riverbed. Then he will have no more promises to keep.

\---

In the place between the graveyard and the long stretch of countryside that leads to the city’s university, there is an open reach of grass that bleeds into a tall, thick forest. This is not the same forest that the Fall Court inhabits. That one stands on the other side of the city, far from the tall slope of the graveyard and the standing sycamore that locals know to avoid in the bitter winters or disappear Under the Hill, never to return even as a pile of time-bleached bones.  If one drives up the long, straight road that cuts through the countryside, and if they slow their car for long enough, they may be able to catch a glimpse of bright, strange creatures flitting over the long grass towards the forest. Creatures that look almost like butterflies, except no butterfly is that big, and butterflies do not sing and they certainly do not know the words to that beautiful song your grandmother used to sing to you as an infant in the safety of your crib.

If you try to wander through the grass in the spring, you will end up with little bruises on the backs of your legs as though hundreds of little fingers have been pinching you. There will be knots in your hair and all your food will spoil. But sometimes, sometimes, you leave the field with clovers in your pockets and honey-scented apples piled high in your arms, and there will be a crown of flowers in your hair and the wind will smell like the first blossoms of the Spring.

Two figures make their way slowly across the field towards the shadowy fringe of the forest. It would seem a strange time to take a leisurely stroll, especially with such a bitter wind and the moon so frightening in the sky like too many pieces of a broken plate smashed on the vast expanse of the night sky. There is no one to watch their movement across grassy spread to the trees, but some inquisitive soul finds their way to this place and takes up watch, they will see that there is something slightly  _ strange _ about these two strangers walking in red-tinted moonlight. Their features are sharp, not in the bony way that some models might look, but in a way that makes a person think of knives, or the black edges of calligraphy on parchment, or the harsh line of mountains in the horizon on a perfectly clear day, or perhaps the shape of white cliffs against a dark and briny sea. The one with tousled hair walks with the arrogance of a prince, his robes flowing and delicate spring green, and his armor gleams crystalline in the moonlight. Every movement is marked with the sweet singing of his chainmail rustling. 

The other, however, marches with the precision of a soldier. His left hand sits impatiently on the hilt of a long, curved sword hanging at his hip. There are tiny barbs at the edge of his wrist, and even more lining the tops of his cheekbones and his thick, expressive eyebrows. His clothes are decorated with emerald stag beetles, and as he moves his shoulders, the tiny jeweled bugs beat their wings in a sleepy rhythm. 

One of them is a prince, heir to the throne of thistle and ivy, born beneath a sweetwater spring with flowers in his hair and golden offerings piled high at his feet. One of them is a bastard son of a high-ranking knight, stolen from his mother’s warm bed, made to learn to fight like his father’s people and taught to despise and sneer down at his mother’s kind and anyone else who feels sympathy for them.

The one with shorter, spiked hair looks upon his companion with deep disapproval as they walk. ‘You didn’t have to do that to the kid,’ he snaps. ‘We have no quarrel with his court. We have no fucking reason to attack  _ anyone _ .’

‘We’re fairies,’ the other figure complains, dragging out his voice into a petulant drawl. ‘We can do whatever we like.’ He tosses his hair with the air of a spoilt prince and pouts his lips prettily.

‘No,’ the fairy with short hair says, his voice deep and angry. ‘ _ I  _ am a fairy.’ He waves his free hand at his companion’s general direction. ‘You, you are a half-breed.’

There is a threat, cold and ominous in the short-haired fairy’s voice. His left hand sits impatiently on the hilt of a long, curved sword hanging at his hip. There are tiny barbs at the edge of his wrist, and even more lining the tops of his cheekbones and his thick, expressive eyebrows. His clothes are decorated with emerald stag beetles, and as he moves his shoulders, the tiny jeweled bugs beat their wings in a sleepy rhythm. 

‘You have  _ no _ idea how fucking awful your behavior is, do you? You’re such an asshole. Nobody likes you,’ he adds savagely.

But the fairy’s companion only laughs, his voice delicate and light. ‘Oh, everyone likes me,’ he responds cheerfully. 

The short-haired fairy ignores this. His hands grips his sword tight enough to make his knuckles strain, bone-white, against his skin. ‘You may never understand this, Fuck-kawa,’ he says icily, picking the nastiest of all nicknames for his childhood friend, ‘but we Fey have rules. And even if we trick and steal and punish those who irritate us, we must always abide by these rules. And tonight, you broke our rules.’ He shakes his head angrily. ‘I should have you beheaded for this.’

‘You won’t,’ the one nicknamed Fuck-kawa calls in a sing-song voice. ‘You love me too much.’

‘Yes, but I’m still very, very angry with you right now.’ 

For this, the short-haired fairy receives a sharp click of the tongue.‘Why are you angry with me?’ Fuck-kawa demands archly. ‘I’m not the one who broke the Ancient Order. But even if I was, isn’t it great? We’re finally free from those old stuffy rules. We can do anything!’ He sweeps his hand in a wide arch above his head, spreading tiny green sparkles in its wake.

The punch comes out of nowhere, whistling lightning-fast through the icy air and colliding with Fuck-kawa’s delicate cheekbones with a sickening crunch. 

‘You’re a fucking idiot,’ the short-haired fairy forces through gritted teeth. The small spikes on his wrists and arms rattle menacingly. His eyes are as black as obsidian and there are too many jagged, shark-like teeth in his mouth. His sword is half drawn, the sheen of the blade catching the red light of the moon and turning it ghostly green instead. 

‘The Ancient Order did not come from a vacuum. There are consequences to your actions, Oikawa. Consequences that  _ I  _ now have to deal with,’ the fairy growls, thumping his chest. ‘You are my responsibility. Everything you do, I have to pay for, threefold. What if you didn’t actually kill Kageyama at all? What if he comes back looking for blood? He’s more powerful than you, and we both know it. He almost killed you during your duel - are you seriously looking for a rematch  _ now? _ Fucking  _ seriously _ ?’

He breaks off, panting heavily. He shakes his head and opens his mouth to unleash another torrent of rage when he halts, his face going oddly slack with fear. He looks up at the moon, broken in two shattered pieces in the sky, then over his shoulder at the stretch of gently waving grass behind them. 

‘Shit,’ he utters. ‘He followed you.’

‘Who followed m-’ says the injured half-breed, but then he is silenced as a haunting, shrieking call echoes across the flat, empty ground.  His eyes grow wide as he searches the quiet grass for signs of the creature that had made that horrible sound. ‘What the hell is that?’

In answer to this question, a dark shape rises from the rolling waves of grass. Its oil-slick skin twists and rolls like too many creatures held together in the depths of a dark well, long limbless bodies writhing in its arms and shoulders. The creature’s eyes gleam as blood-red as the shattered moon hanging low in the sky, and its wide-open mouth is a wet gash full of teeth like broken glass. It lifts its taloned hands and screeches. The noise is a thousand iron nails scraping across chalkboard, glass breaking on a marble floor, foxes screaming in the night and a hundred crows calling out for revenge.

‘ **You killed my friend,** ’ says the creature. It points a curved talon at the half-breed’s ashen face. ‘ **I will give you a death three times as painful as the one you gave him.** ’

The half-breed’s voice is stuck in his throat as he steps back from the creature, almost out of reflex. But the fairy squares his shoulders and steps in front of his companion, drawing his sword fully. The ghostly-green blade gleams with a light all of its own. He motions with one hand at his clothes, and the ornamental green stag beetles spread their wings, rising up around him in a protective swarm. The fairy clenches his teeth, sliding his feet apart into a solid base. He has trained his entire life to fight, even though his Court has not had enemies for centuries, but he has never seen anything quite so horrifying as this oil-slick monster. He whirls his sword in his hand to reassure himself of the perfect balance of the magicked blade.

‘Changeling,’ the fairy says, his voice steady despite the alarm in his eyes. He knows this beast, or at least, the fleshy cage it wears under the light of the sun. ‘Show the half-breed mercy. My Court shall enact a punishment that is fair and just, under the Ancient Order.’

The oil-slick beast laughs in wet huffs deep from its belly. ‘ **Can you not see, beetle-prince?** ’ the creature says, pointing at the shattered bloodmoon. ‘ **The Ancient Order is broken. Only I can enact my revenge now.** ’ 

The fairy flinches, but he does not move out of the creature’s way. He grips the hilt of his sword even tighter in his hand. ‘Don’t do this, Changeling,’ he says.

‘ **It is already done,** ’ the oil-slick beast says.

And then it charges.

\---

When Tsukishima reappears, he wears a crown of beaded blood upon his forehead like a thread of tiny roses. His glasses are gone and his eyes are all liquid light, and the teeth in his mouth have grown needle-sharp. His hair curls thick and gold around the tips of his ears, hiding the pointed tops, but there is nothing about him that is not terrifying. Tiny shimmering firefly-fairies have gathered around his neck to feast upon the spattered blood on the long stretch of skin on his neck. Their glittering bioluminescence flickers as they press their tongues and stick-like legs against his skin. There are other creatures parading in his wake, drawn by the brutality of his kill, chattering in hollow clicks as they stick to the deepest shadows beneath the riverbank. If Sugawara looks too hard at them, they dissolve into smoke and drift 

Tsukishima moves as though the laws of flesh and bone do not apply to him. He is moonlight, slipping over the water. Smoke, drifting swift upon a wild winter wind. There is nothing about him that is not blindingly magnificent.

He holds soggy, sick fleshy folds in his left hand, and in his other arm he holds a knife once silver-edged but now completely dark. His arms are painted sticky with crimson liquid. There is a firm, determined look on his face. The wind sweeps around his ankles and catches at the river, leaving choppy waves in its wake. 

Sugawara rises to his feet automatically, feeling himself bend at the waist ready to drop into a low bow. The elf’s magic is heady, like too much wine and a million fireworks screaming and popping up above in a clear midnight sky. 

‘That was interesting,’ Tsukishima remarks nonchalantly, as if he is not covered in blood and gore. He nods at Kageyama and the silvery knots holding him in one piece. ‘I need you to take those off real quick, just so I can put this on him.’ He shakes the skin of the unfortunate human he caught. Blood splatters onto his trainers, turning the grey edges black. 

‘Alright,’ Sugawara says, keeping his voice calm. ‘What sort of human did you kill?’

Tsukishima kneels beside Kageyama. He pushes the skin out flat, seemingly unaffected by the sick squelch of fat and still-wet skin sliding and stretching over each other. ‘Kageyama here hooked a tracking spell onto the human,’ he explains. He unfolds what was once the face of the human and stretches it over Kageyama’s face. ‘Very obvious why he chose this particular vermin. Kageyama grew up with wicker-witches, right? And all the wicker-witches are women?’

Sugawara nods once, grateful he does not have to look at the human skin.

‘This piece of shit delighted in taking young girls to the old city ruins,’ Tsukishima continues, ‘and raping them.’

Sugawara feels a flash of white-cold rage roar through his blood. How  _ dare _ he?

Tsukishima snorts. ‘Yes, I know,’ he replies to the unspoken statement. ‘That’s why I didn’t kill him before I skinned him.’ He gives his handiwork one last sweeping look before rising to his feet. He looks over the river, where the current rolls knots and patterns into the sleek surface of the water. ‘By the way, I didn’t find the fairies who did this to Kageyama,’ he adds, frowning slightly. ‘And I couldn’t find Hinata. I tracked him up the river, but his magical trace cuts short just a few feet from here.’

Sugawara curses under his breath. In all his years of being Pair to the Crows, there has not once been a fuck-up as spectacular as this. He fishes his phone out of the pocket of his jeans. ‘The Hounds should be able to find him,’ he said out loud, more to reassure himself than anything else. He types out a message hurriedly, glancing up at the broken moon. 

‘They won’t be able to find him.’

The hoarse, croaking voice startles Sugawara so much he almost drops his phone. He catches it after two fumbles and presses it against his wildly beating heart. ‘For fuck’s sake, Kageyama!’ he cries, too relieved to be exasperated. ‘Don’t scare me like that!’

The mage laughs, the sound coming out all raspy and strange, like he hasn’t laughed in years. And maybe he hasn’t. ‘Oh, please,’ he smiles. ‘You’re glad to see me, really.’ He pushes the bloodied skin off his body and, standing up with a small wince, throws it into the river with one graceful motion. When he swipes his palm over his chest to clear away the gore, the wounds are nowhere to be seen. ‘Thanks for the skin, Kei. I don’t actually wear them, though. Fortunately, I got my mother’s looks and not my father’s.’ He smiles thinly, as though enjoying a particularly dry joke. 

Tsukishima watches him steadily with luminescent eyes. He says nothing, and maybe the corner of his mouth curves in the slightest of smiles, but nothing else belays his reaction to Kageyama’s words.

‘Very clever,’ adds the mage, ‘figuring out what I am.’ He indicates the blood caking on his skin, and the wet, flat crowfeathers covering his lean, muscular chest. 

The elf lifts a shoulder in a careless shrug. ‘Not everyone is an idiot like you,’ he says cooly. ‘But I do understand why you kept it secret, you know,’ he adds. ‘There are so many reasons why someone runs from their true nature.’

Kageyama’s eyes narrow slightly as he studies Tsukishima. His face is covered in streaks of blood and somehow that makes his sharp edges soft and not quite so jarring. The broken bloodmoon streams red moonlight down on the two creatures, one made of shadow and death, the other gleaming gold and whispering silver.

‘Yes,’ Kageyama says at last. ‘I suppose you do understand.’ He turns away, and the spell is broken. ‘Right, let’s go,’ he announces. ‘I know where Hinata’s gone.’ He looks up at the moon quickly, his mouth flattening into a grim line. ‘I also know what he’s shifted into.’

Tsukishima frowns deeply. ‘Doesn’t he just split up into different pieces?’ he says, seeming slightly perplexed as to the necessity of Kageyama’s statement. ‘That freaky collection of…’ he gestures with his hand as he searches for the appropriate description, ‘ _ things _ he always turns into?’ As he says this, he shudders theatrically, but there is a lightness in his eyes in place of what had always previously been cold apathy.

Kageyama shakes his head slowly. ‘Not this time,’ he says. ‘I know Hinata, and I know what happens when he loses control.’ He presses his hand against his bare chest, wincing as though he can still feel the agony of being crushed and torn open. 

Sugawara feels a jolt of worry turn his stomach to ice. Was the skin not effective? Did his knitting spells leave a scar? He feels himself already knitting another moon spell to ease Kageyama’s pain.

But Kageyama’s face shifts into the well-worn lines of his characteristic frown. ‘We need to hurry before he tears Oikawa limb from limb,’ he states grimly. 

‘Don’t you want that irritating mage killed?’ asks Tsukishima, arching his eyebrows. ‘After what he did to you?’

Kageyama’s jaw is strained as he clenches it tight. ‘Well, of course I want him dead,’ he snaps. He swipes more blood off himself and shakes it onto the pebbled beach, wrinkling his nose in distaste. He looks up at Tsukishima, the grooves in his forehead cast into stark relief in the low light. ‘I’d rather I did it myself, instead of that idiot Hinata getting all the satisfaction.’ 

If Sugawara laughs at this statement, then he is only laughing out of shock, and not at all because he is delighted at the mage’s bloodthirsty nature.  

\---

Iwaizumi dodges the changeling-beast’s talons for the fifth time, rolling into the tall grass and getting mud smeared all over his emerald-green clothes. Not that it overly matters of course. It isn’t exactly hard to pick between keeping his head attached to his shoulders and a muddy tunic. His small army of spell-animated stag beetles swoop in low around the changeling-beast’s head, distracting it momentarily as it swipes furiously at the darting beetles. Iwaizumi gets to his feet gracefully, tossing his sword from his right hand to his left. His right side feels bruised from being kicked twice in rapid succession, and he suspects a good number of his bones are broken. He glances over at Oikawa, who is determinedly looping a glistening thread of magic up and over his forearm, ready to throw it over to Iwaizumi. The initial panic seems to have faded from the half-breed’s eyes, and instead his irritatingly smarmy smirk is spread over his face as he builds his magic stronger and stronger. Oikawa is always confident in a fight, confident he will win, confident he will always be enough to support every single one of Iwaizumi’s attacks.

_ It won’t be enough, though, will it? _ Iwaizumi grits his teeth. He has to attack first. His defense is not as strong as it should be against the changeling-beast’s overbearing strength, and he cannot keep ducking and dodging all night. To make matters worse, every spell that Oikawa has lobbed at the creature’s oil-slick skin just gets  _ absorbed _ and the creature’s stench gets stronger and stronger. It stinks of coal and fire-magic, of buried corpses beneath damp soil and of bleached bones and dried marrow. 

_ It stinks of the fallout of war. _

Iwaizumi makes a habit of ensuring that he knows everything that Oikawa gets himself involved in. It’s a sort of damage control, if you will. Oikawa has a habit of pissing people off. Iwaizumi keeps a complete record of everything Kageyama does and who he associates with, in the hopes that he might be able to see any vengeful attack coming. He knows that the changeling Kageyama took for a Pair is a shapeshifter. He never really knew what sort of shapeshifter the changeling might be, and he has absolutely no idea now, because fairies aren’t supposed to look like this, not even the scary ones. He thinks maybe this time Oikawa has really fucked up and made an enemy of a creature from a time before the Old Ways and the Ancient Order, back when the world was nothing more than primordial soup and earth-fire. 

He grunts in frustration as he ducks another blow. This time, the talon slashes straight through tunic and into his side. The wound stings as he straightens. He winces, cupping the shallow gash at his side. The blood sits thick and sap-green in his hands. 

His right side is injured. His left side is bleeding. He isn’t going to last much longer.

‘Oikawa!’ he barks. ‘I’m going to fucking kill you.’ He jerks to the side, hard enough to lose his balance. He falls into a perfectly-tucked roll and parries with his sword. The motion pulls his wound apart far enough for him to hiss from the pain. ‘This is all your fault,’ he shouts, indicating his bloodied side.

Oikawa throws him the thread of magic. He moves his fingers in the air, commanding the thread to knot itself around Iwaizumi’s wrist and forearm. ‘I didn’t know he’d take it so personally!’ he retorts sulkily.

‘ _ Personally? _ ’ bellows Iwaizumi. His sword hits thin air as the changeling-beast darts just beyond his reach. He swaps sword-hands and swings it in a swift arc. He is fast enough to make a hit, but it is nothing more than a scratch in the side of the beast. ‘ _ Of course it was personal,  _ you idiot. You tried to kill his Pair.’

‘I only tried to kill him a little bit,’ protests Oikawa. He clenches his fist. Tiny green sparks erupt from his fingertips, hovering around his wrist expectantly. ‘Are you ready?’ he asks swiftly, grounding his feet firmly in the ground.

The changeling-beast growls as it swipes hard across Iwaizumi’s face, hitting him hard in the jaw. The fairy stumbles back a few steps, blinking away the stars from his vision. A tooth swims around in his mouth, knocked clean out of its place. He spits it out into his hand and hurls it angrily at the ground. Enough is enough. He lunges forward, stabbing the changeling-beast hard and true in its leg. Thick, dark blood splatters over the grass as the beast howls in pain and rage. It isn’t enough to stop the monster, but it is enough to buy them enough time to perform the spell.

Iwaizumi looks over his shoulder at his mage, face tight with concentration. ‘Now!’ he commands. 

The mage nods once and releases his side of the thread.

Magic snaps from mage to fairy, sharp like an elastic band pulled tight and released. The magic slams hard into his side, stinging like salt in his open wound and knitting it tightly shut on its way. Oikawa’s magic burns through his veins, invading his body and knitting itself  _ into _ his magic. His lungs collapse inwards, but he has done this since he was only a child sparring in the forest with his brothers. He is the bow, to be drawn, and Oikawa is the arrow notched tight against him to be released into their enemies’ chests. 

He twists his forefinger and middle finger together, and pulls the magic out from his chest to where it singes his fingertips and burns in the green veins at his wrist. His fingernails turn black from the effort of holding the spell in. This sort of spell takes the right timing, the right pressure, and he cannot let go, not just yet. He grits his teeth against the building pain. 

The changeling-beast turns its head, frothy poison falling from its knife-wound of a mouth. Its eyes are narrowed slits, and behind them, crackling flames dance within the monster’s hollowed-out skull. It drops its jaw open, baring its horrifying teeth and its long, black tongue. It takes a step towards Iwaizumi.

_ Now. _

The fairy yanks his fingers apart. The magic floods out of him, waters breaking forth from a dam and flooding the valley below. Thick glass vines with thick, poisoned vines erupt from his palm, tearing apart the flesh and skin. Iwaizumi hisses in pain. The vines lash across the gaping space between them, aimed straight for the changeling-beast’s heart.

There is a sound like wind chimes dancing in the wind, and a tortured scream.

Iwaizumi falls to the ground, clutching his mangled hand. The vines are no more: they are but shattered pieces of gleaming green glass sparkle in between tufts of tall grass. The beast stands unharmed in the light of the broken bloodmoon, and before him stands a towering figure with curling golden hair and luminescent eyes. The strange fairy resonates with a deep, bass-like power that thunders up from beneath and shapes the wind that howls around them. There is so much magic in him that it seems to leak out of his skin. His lean body dressed in unassuming human clothes that are dirty and stark against his pearlescent skin. The golden fairy passes his gaze over Iwaizumi. He feels it shudder down straight to the bone. He has never once felt afraid of another of his kind, but there is something in this newcomer’s bearing, something familiar in the planes and sharp points of his unearthly face that makes everything old and animalistic in Iwaizumi’s body freeze over. 

The golden fairy moves his attention to Oikawa. His eyes narrow, and the light grows bright enough to match the now-absent sun. 

‘So,’ he says, his voice slicing neatly through the wind like a sharp dagger through warm butter. ‘You’re the fairy that tried to kill Kageyama.’ 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the looooong break - I was attempting to sort my shit out before moving to America. More to come soon!


	8. Snake, Beetle, Cat

You do not pull the teeth from a snake’s mouth if the snake does not bite.

This small, painful sentence has played a jagged refrain in Tsukishima’s chest since the day Akiteru died. 

_ Died _ . Such a passive word, that one. It is a word of convenience, a phrase that lifts the blame from any one person’s shoulders and instead lets it float, pathetic and meaningless, in the air. It is not the right word to describe what happened that day, in the deep, heavy-falling snow. A different word would be more accurate.  _ Murdered. Executed. Slaughtered. Extinguished. _

Tsukishima keeps these memories embedded deep in his heart. At night, he takes off his shirt and forces himself to look at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, haunted and sallow in the white neon light. He runs his fingers through his short, spiky hair. He presses his glasses firmly on his face and feels the tiny iron particles burn and pull at his face, contort the damaging beauty out of his features. He turns his arms so that he can see the soft inner parts, so he can stare at the half-moons burned into his skin to remind him of what a child may lose if he wishes for what he cannot have.

A child can never have power.

A child can never have love.

A child stands naked in a clearing with blood streaming from his arms and iron-burns deep in his flesh and his crown shattered upon the floor and his brother’s decapitated head set at his feet like a twisted offering.

And a child remembers:  _ you do not pull the teeth from a snake’s mouth if the snake does not bite _ .

Except, here the child stands, no longer a child, and there is blood dark and drying on his hands and he can feel all of the Old Mother’s gifts sing strong and heady in his blood, and upon his lips he can still feel the ghost of a kiss taken, true and free. He cast three old spells today, three forbidden, glorious spells. He cannot step back into the shadows, for now he feels the roaring of the bloodmoon tumbling down upon him and he stands, feet apart, and accepts the weight of its magic. 

You do not pull the teeth from a snake’s mouth if the snake does not bite.

But Tsukishima is not a snake.

‘You,’ Tsukishima repeats, pointing at the halfling. ‘Idiot with the smile and the flouncy hair. You tried to kill Kageyama.’ 

There is blood and bits of shattered bone cling to the bottom of the the halfling’s boot, and yet his smile is bright and careless as though he is out for a leisurely midnight stroll without a care in the world. He is not afraid. 

He should be.

‘Oh, so I didn’t actually kill him?’ the halfling says, his voice cheerful and light, as if he is make a comment on the weather. ‘What a shame.’

‘Oikawa, this is not the time,’ the other fairy hisses urgently. His hand weeps blood onto the tall blades of grass by his legs. The corners of his eyes are drawn tight with pain. He stinks of fear and worry. 

Tsukishima’s counter-spell must have hit him hard. There is no satisfaction in that realization. Tsukishima knows how powerful he is, and has always known. If anything, this spell in a long line of forbidden spells is but a mark of defeat. His was a war waged against his skin, his flesh, his magic, his blood and his bloodline. His war was a flurry of battles won, but for nothing, because in the end he has become his father’s son anyways.

‘You must forgive my friend,’ the beetle-fairy says quickly, his eyes averted as he dips into a bow. ‘My lord, he does not know what disrespect he shows you.’

Tsukishima narrows his eyes. ‘I am no lord,’ he states. It is the truth, in a way, for one cannot lord over corpses and empty halls. ‘Tell me,  _ my lord _ ,’ he continues, flinging the word back like a knife, ‘is that half-blood your friend, your lover, or your servant?’

A muscle twitches in the beetle-fairy’s jaw as he fights against the question. The Fair Folk can twist fire and earth and root and bark to their fancy, but they are bound to the truth. The Fair Folk cannot lie. Oh, they may twist the truth into pretty poetry, or they may evade a direct answer, but to do so in this particular stand-off would give Tsukishima plenty of justification to lop two pretty heads off. 

‘Unfortunately, my lord, he is all of that,’ the beetle-fairy rasps out, his eyes burning with anger and shame. 

His bare wrists and his face are covered in little black barbs that rattle with his rising emotion. He is made of the forest and its deep, moist roots. His blood is almost as old as the gold whispering in Tsukishima’s veins, almost as old as the dead Moon Garden beneath the city. He is not angry at Tsukishima. He is angry at himself. He is ashamed of his servant, but is too wrapped up in the thick tendrils of love to be able to punish him as a prince should.

Love is a weakness. Love is a mystical creature of a world that was extinguished long ago. Love is death.

Love leads to a beheading by your own silver-edged sword. Love leads to a beautiful woman being strung up by her neck in the woods with her eyes bulging and rotting in their sockets while the crows feast upon her corpse. Love is screaming in the winter-bone woods until you forget what it felt like not to scream. Love is the color of blood painted upon the dazzling blue walls of your mother’s bedroom as she begs for her life, for the lives of her courtiers and her dancers. 

Love is death.

Tsukishima’s fingers tighten around the hilt of his dagger. ‘Do you take responsibility for the half-blood’’s actions?’ he asks coldly. ‘Will you take the punishment for him?’

The beetle-fairy pales visibly, and it is not due to the blood dripping from his hand. 

Tsukishima feels no pity for him. He has a choice: to die for his love, or to have his love die at his own hands. 

Akiteru never had that choice.

_ Doesn’t he know, this beetle-prince, that royal hearts are not made for soft things? Love is a soft thing. Love is a deadly weapon made of swan-feathers and hummingbird-flutter hearts.  _

‘Leave him out of this!’ cries the halfling. He scrambles in front of the injured fairy, spreading his arms out in a protective shield. His broken spells hang around his elbows like tattered ropes, their gleam already dead. For once, the smile is wiped off his face.

Tsukishima stares him down impassively. ‘Is he not your prince? Do you not serve at the foot of his throne?’ There is a caged monster deep within Tsukishima, a snake with fangs crystallized out of the tears he has swallowed over the long, empty centuries. He has no empathy to spare for creatures like these: careless and arrogant; stupid and obediently chained to a pile of explosives. 

He sets his hand on the oilslick-monster’s flank, feeling the alien magic rumble through his knuckles and buzz in his elbow. He cannot place a name on the familiar taste of it. He recalls this song from a dark dream, somewhere in a time before he became an orphan weeping in the winter-bone woods, before he learned to fold and cut and dissolve the pieces of him that were once bright and bold and powerful. Hinata is old magic, Old Magic even, older than the Old Ways and the Ones Who Came Before. 

He wonders if they perhaps have more in common than he once imagined. 

‘I have no reason to stop Hinata from claiming his revenge,’ he says softly. ‘But if you ask it of me, I will give you the gift of a painless death.’ He lets his hands brush the silver-edged knife hanging at his hip. He knows a hundred ways of extinguishing life with this small blade. He was taught them all before he was taught to ride. 

Beside him, the Hinata-beast laughs in heavy, wet clumps of chest-deep sounds. ‘ **Let me take your life, beetle-prince** ’ he grins, red tongue lolling against his slash-white teeth. ‘ **I will rip your limbs and feast upon your marrow.** ’ 

‘Well, human-halfling,’ Tsukishima says, ‘I think the changeling makes a fair bargain. Perhaps I should let him, ah, what was it?’ Tsukishima squints up at the beast. ‘Feast upon the prince’s marrow?’ 

Desperation flashes hot and fast over the halfling’s face. His expression contorts into an angry smile, sharp and vicious like a knife-gash. ‘Hey, hey,’ the halfling laughs mirthlessly, the noise more like a bark than anything else. ‘You threaten Iwa again, I’ll kill you.’

Tsukishima doesn’t even blink. He can almost taste the desperation rolling off the two fairies. It’s fucking pathetic, really. ‘Are you quite sure you’ll be able to do that?’ he responds. ‘And, in the rare chance that you’ll be able to touch me, do you think you’ll be able to make a single mark on this thing?’ He gestures casually at the looming nightmare beside him.

The Hinata-beast’s maw of a mouth widens to reveal even more teeth. ‘ **Yes,** ’ it intones. ‘ **I will make your ribcage a crown. I will drink your magic until you are dry.** ’ 

The halfling falters. His eyes dart from Tsukishima to the Hinata-beast, then aside to where his lord is trembling on unsteady feet. The halfling’s collarbones strain against his creamy skin, tendons pushing up and drawing stark shadows over his neck. His hair sticks to his forehead, matted and clumped. He is no longer beautiful. His cheeks are blotched and his eyes are bloodshot. He is a wild fox gnawing desperately at its ankle firmly clamped in the iron jaws of a hunter’s trap. 

‘We do not need to have this endless argument,’ Tsukishima says, shaking his head. It has been a long night. He has no desire to have more blood on his hands, especially not blood as old as his own. The halfling, however, is worth no more than a wet leaf left crumpled up in the gutter. 

Kageyama might be an absolute freak of nature. He does not belong here, not on these lands with hollow courtyards and ghost revelries and interlinked moon-sun magic buried deep in quiet graves and scattered bones. He is not made of root and stone and blood and promises. The boy is chaos. He is deep and ancient and Wild and Foreign. He is made of something more terrifying than hunger or mischief or ancient rules made for crumbling, empty halls. His is the call of the churning iron core of the earth, the thundering of bison-hooves across gold and brown land. His is unpredictable. Ruthless. 

If anything, Kageyama frightens Tsukishima, with his dark eyes and his crow-feather hair and the haunted circles under his eyes. Tsukishima would probably be a hell of a lot happier with Kageyama gone. Less freaks in the bucket of fuck-ups he has found himself company to. 

But no one deserves what the halfling did to Kageyama. No one deserves such careless, triumphant cruelty. Especially not from a  _ halfling _ , a half-mortal. 

There is an Order to things. There has always been an Order to things. 

‘You know what you must do,’ Tsukishima tells the prince. He gestures sharply at his throat, from collar bone to collar bone. ‘Do this, and we will have no quarrel.’

The halfling falls to his knees. His mouth half-forms a protest, only to look at his liege with wide, frightened eyes. He knows he fucked up. 

_ Too fucking late, asshole. _

Tsukishima’s hands shake. There is an Order to things. There is an elaborate woven web of a million cat’s cradles tethered to everything, waking or dormant, that moves magic from one source to another, and this web is what holds their world, their Underworld, together. But the strands are all snapped and blowing wild and careless in the wind, and his gold-magic roars in his body and demands that the damage be undone. The moon is red and broken in the sky and Kageyama was dead and quiet by the river, maybe not for long, but he was  _ dead _ .

_ You do not pull the teeth from a snake’s mouth if the snake does not bite _ .

He knows how to look calm. He knows how to fold a marble catacomb around himself and lock his torrential anger and sorrow away. He is dutiful. He is wise. He  _ learned _ . He carries the curse-runes on his skins, horrible shining scars that remind him of all the things is not allowed to want, not allowed to do. He cannot be a snake, cannot be the son of his father’s court, of his mother’s garden.

But the restraints are shattered and no amount of repeating the words to himself can keep him together.

_ You do not pull the teeth from a snake’s mouth- _

‘Please,’ the beetle-prince gasps. He is on his knees too, and his blood is still running down over his beautiful clothes and his beautiful sword. ‘Please, do not ask this of me. Have mercy.’

- _ if the snake- _

‘And where was your mercy when your servant killed our friend?’ Tsukishima snaps. ‘Did you try to stop him? Did you hold him back while he had his fun?’ There is a thundering in his ears and he cannot keep his magic within. His teeth are sharp and the Old Mother whispers to him from the very base of his being.

_ -does not- _

‘Do you think that because you did not inflict the blows yourself,’ he snarls, ‘you did not kill him? The child’s blood is on  _ your _ hands.’ He does not know how to stop. His arms are burning, the curse-marks biting into his rising power, trying to suck the magic out of him, but Tsukishima is not a snake, never was, never will be.

_ -does not- _

_ He thinks of shocked faces beneath crow-black helmets, sickened pixies and goblins and trolls trying to turn away from the macabre scene unfolding before them at the hands of their beautiful, dangerous Queen. He thinks of the mothers who hid their children’s faces. He thinks of hundreds and hundreds of people who could have said something, anything. _

_ Hundreds of fairies who watched the Unseelie Queen kill Akiteru.  _

_ Watched her kill Tsukisima’s brother. _

_ And didn’t do a single fucking thing about it. _

‘You should have just tortured Kageyama yourself,’ Tsukishima snarls. ‘It was not your boot in his chest, in his broken bones, but it may as well have been. You did nothing. You let it happen. You are as guilty as him,’ he lashes out, pointing at the kneeling halfling. ‘You killed him too.  _ You killed him. _ ’

_ He sees his brother’s golden eyes flash towards the twitching legs of the woman he loved. He sees the emptiness in those eyes, once full of love and light and sunfire. He sees those eyes meet his, across the empty clearing, beyond all the standing fairies quiet and silent and useless, fucking useless in their fear and shock. _

_ I’m sorry, says Akiteru. _

_ The hot iron sears into Tsukishima’s flesh. He screams. _

_ The silver-edged swords swings in a wide arc, and reflected in the flat blade, the moon is hauntingly beautiful. Akiteru’s head falls into the snow and rolls, over and over and over, to Tsukishima’s feet. _

_ And no one says a single thing. It is silent, as though the world is a vacant tomb, and the soft flesh on Tsukishima’s arms sizzle and he is a child cursed until the day he dies, and his beautiful brother is dead, the brother that everyone claimed to love, the Beloved Prince. The Courts of his Mother and his Father are burning, and nobody says a single word. _

‘You killed him,’ says Tsukishima, and suddenly he isn’t quite sure where he is anymore. 

He is no longer holding a small dagger. In its stead, he holds a long silver-edged sword. The light of a circular blue-white moon glistens off the blade’s smooth surface, while the moon’s shattered red sister hangs in the sky. 

‘ **Do it,** ’ intones the oil-slick creature, in the voices of a hundred soldier’s ashes floating quiet in a catacomb that was once a palace. ‘ **Carry out my justice, Kei.** ’ 

And he swings his mother’s blade.

\---

The red light of the moon filters through the empty windowpanes of a half-collapsed building, the shapes that once held wood and glass hollowed out like the eye sockets of a long-abandoned skull. The eerie gloom blackens the splash of dark liquid over the dusty, rubble-cluttered floor, but it does nothing to hide the brutality of the body that lies mutilated in the ruins by the river. What once had breath in its lungs and blood coursing through its veins is now an array of exposed muscle, sinew, and bone. The corpse is neatly peeled, like a grape. Not a single shred of skin nor a tuft of hair is left clinging to flesh.

Nearby, with its paws a mere inch from the drying blood, there sits a cat. Its eyes flash gold despite the eerie gloom, lit by some internal flame. It blinks once, then turns its head slowly to fix its unblinking stare on the tall figure standing in a crumbling doorway.

‘There’s been a fuck-up,’ the figure reports. ‘Kuroo wanted me to let you know.’

The cat looks at him, impassive.

‘Also that pretty-faced mage in the Court of the Spring King is dead,’ the grey-haired creature continues. ‘An elf blade.’

The cat paws at the pool of blood, then lifts its soiled limb to its mouth. It cleans away the mottled blood slowly, neither in distaste nor with great pleasure.

The figure frowns deeply. ‘How do you know?’

The cat halts its cleaning and looks at the figure, long and hard with its gleaming yellow eyes.

‘That’s not an answer,’ the figure grumbles. 

The moon does not move, nor do the stars, and the sun does not brush across the sky, but the shadows skitter across the floor like so many spiders. The cat falls into darkness, and is gone. Limbs unfold, whiskers dissipate, and the shadows return to their place. A small-limbed fairy stands in the cat’s place, brown stains clinging beneath his fingernails.

‘Old families like us,’ he says quietly, in a voice that is too deep for a body too much like a child’s, ‘we know when one of us dies.’ He picks at the crusted blood beneath his fingernails, mild irritation flickering only briefly on his face. ‘You should know,’ he adds. ‘There is elf blood in you. It hasn’t drowned in all that ogre yet.’

‘Why does that sound like an insult?’ the fairy grumbles, kicking at a loose brick.

The boy who is not a boy, and not a cat, folds his jacket around him and tuck his scarf into his collar. He does not wear the same glittering white armor as his fellow Trooping Knight. He misses the illusion, the once-warm embrace of being almost human, so he wears his human clothing like another skin of glamor. Not human. Not fae. 

He pushes strands of hair behind his ear and regards the tall fairy with a steady, unblinking gaze. ‘Don’t you know?’ he says softly. ‘Don’t you know the history of how the Courts came to be?’ He smiles, the expression thin and half-hearted, and too quickly extinguished from his delicate, feline features. ‘Be grateful that you are a mutt, and not pure-blooded. To be an elf is to wait for your death. Death by your Queen. Death in the Hunt. Death at the hands of another fairy angry for the breaking of some stupid ancient rule. ’

The boy who is not a boy, and is not a cat either, looks up at the broken moon. For the first time, he wonders about another boy, who is also not a boy, and where his bright fire-colored hair comes from, or where his angry, hungry, reckless magic grows from. Magic must have roots, but the fire-haired creature has no roots. He is constantly in flight.

_ Unless those roots have been burnt. _

Maybe the other boy who is not a boy is made from ash, death, and a genocide quietly forgotten. 

‘I think I’ll go see him,’ the boy who is not a boy says, and vanishes with a wisp of moonlight and shadows, scuttling like so many spiders.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow okay this took way too long to write for such a short fucking chapter. I apologize to all the people waiting for this one! Thank you for sticking through with me! Hopefully while my winter holiday lasts I can bang out a few more chapters. (This was a seriously stubborn chapter. It did NOT want to be written.)


	9. I Wish You The Best With Your Sins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Friendship is not a curse.  
> ‘But I am,’ whispers Tobio, except this time, he believes it a little less.

Kageyama stands in the middle of the river and water droplets cling to his too-thin, too-lean frame in rapture. His skin is liquid, and his eyes are the darkest shadows between the stars in the sky. His hair clings dark to the nape of his neck as he washes away the blood and the filth of the human whose life was stolen to bring him back. The crow-feathers on his chest shine wet like obsidian in the night and there are scars on his back, long ravaged scars that reach his hips and are so old it frightens Sugawara to think of how old (or how young) he was when they were inflicted.

Kageyama stands in the middle of the river, and he is tall and handsome and strong and _wild_ and alone. His shoulders hunch up around his ears protectively, like someone is going to sweep across the river and kick him again, curdle his magic like sour milk so that it eats him up and tears him into pieces, folds him inside-out. He never complains. He never says a word. But he is lonely and all the power and hunger in this shadow-world cannot cure a boy’s loneliness. And Sugawara has no loom with which to weave a life of glory and warmth and glittering diamonds to set upon that raven head.

Kageyama stands in the middle of the river and he is the thunder that comes over a dry golden field after a long drought and Sugawara is the fucking thinnest thread because the moon sits in the sky like a broken plate and he was born of the moon, and the garden that fed him magic is empty now and his Queen is dead.

Kageyama stands in the middle of the river and Sugawara watches him from the shore, he sits on the black pebbles with his knuckles pressed against his lips, and he wishes for frayed things to weave themselves together again, for a dead garden to blossom, for a broken moon to blink silver and bless the water, bless the earth, bless his tired fucking heart because he made promises to a boy with a silent heart and now he does not know if they are promises still.

Sugawara made him stay, in the end, instead of following hot on Tsukishima’s heels. The young mage is still injured. His ribs are cracked, still, and even as they heal themselves Sugawara’s chest constricts in on itself with jagged pain as though it were his bones that had been stomped on and broken. And there is none better to enact justice than the blond elf. The Old Blood in Tsukishima’s veins will demand the correct punishment. It will enforce to Old Ways, even with the moon broken and blood-red. It demands that Tsukishima be who he was born to be.

 _Survive,_ Sugawara had told Kageyama. _Heal. Take care of yourself so you can fight another day._

And Kageyama, reluctantly, had walked into the river to wash the blood and muck off himself.

He remembers the bones of the boys and girls he kissed and the way they are now bleached beyond recognition, because time passes, and he does not. He remembers the price of making promises. The fair folk do not break promises. They _cannot_ break promises. And he does not say the many things that swept through him rough and wild like the river, powerful and rapier-sharp like Kageyama’s magic, as he wove moon-spell lilies over the mage’s eyelids to ease his pain.

So, he bites down on his knuckles. Better to pretend those promises are not promises at all.

‘Are you alright?’ calls Kageyama from the water, his voice rough at the edges as recovering from a bad cold and not the ravenous jaws of death.

Sugawara’s voice is like silk, so, so smooth, when he calls back. He has centuries of practice of keeping his face calm while his insides whirl like starlings in murmuration. ‘Fine! Are you almost done?’

Instead of responding, the mage begins to wade towards the pebbled shore. The river licks down from his waist, to the sharp muscular line of his hips, dragging down his waterlogged pants as he makes his way through the water from the deeper part of the river to the shallows. Sugawara rises to his feet. He holds out his coat, ready to wrap around Kageyama when he is near.

‘I can’t ruin your coat,’ Kageyama frowns, refusing to step within the silver-haired mage’s reach. ‘I don’t have the money or the spells to fix it. Or buy a new one.’

‘Well, I do,’ Sugawara responds. He presses his lips together and watches the way Kageyama is pretending not to shiver. ‘You’re coming back with me. There’s a warm bath and plenty of food, and there’s an empty room you can stay in.’

‘Daichi-’

‘Will let me have my way, if he knows what’s good for him,’ Sugawara states firmly. ‘And so will you.’

The younger mage looks hesitant. His eyes flicker towards the horizon, where Tsukishima went, and his brow furrows deeply.

‘I still have my phone,’ Sugawara reminds him, patting the pocket of his jeans, where the cold metal device burns unpleasantly against his skin.

There is enough gold and nickel and copper in the thing to counteract the steel and plastic, but it still grates at the edges of his awareness. In the old days of the Hunt, they had flowers that bloomed in different colors to communicate. But those flowers were linked to the Unseelie Court, and those gates had long since been closed. Daichi likes phones well enough, and he begrudgingly used the flowers when they still bloomed, but he much prefers stalking down the Crows himself and yelling at them, nice and close and personal. Sugawara allows himself a small, fond smile.

‘Tsukishima will call me to tell me if anything happens. He will be fine. Hinata will be fine.’

Kageyama steps into the fold of the coat. Sugawara fastens it around him, feeling the deathly ice that is the young mage’s skin and the cold water dripping from his hair. He steps away from Kageyama, quietly taking in the sharp lines of his features soften with relief and exhaustion. He is young, so damned young, a mere fledgling Crow, and it has been a long and awful night.

‘If I cast a spell to bring us back to my apartment,’ the silver-haired mage says softly, ‘can you tether yourself to it?’ He twists his fingers over his wrists, weaving what moonlight he has left into threads that reach out, trembling, towards Kageyama’s forearms, waiting to be accepted.

Kageyama’s lips are thin and his forehead wrecked with deep grooves.

‘Friendship is not a curse,’ Sugawara tells him gently. He says nothing about promises and dreams and bones in a dead garden.

Kageyama smiles then, suddenly and sharply, and even in the light of a broken moon, he is _radiant_ , as though he belongs in a garden full of blooming moon-lilies and star-jewels and a Queen with silver in her blood and opals for eyes. ‘I suppose not,’ he says, and he grasps the ends of Sugawara’s spell and starts to weave.

\---

Hinata sits quietly in the field with the too-long grass moving far above his head, like he is drowning in it. He turns his bright head slightly as he notices Kenma’s approach.

‘I did a bad thing,’ he says, and his voice does not sound like his even if it does sound like his. There is an echo in it that is spoken through sharp, hooked fangs.

‘Was it a bad thing?’ Kenma asks. He knows the rules were broken, none of them by Hinata. He can taste them on the red rays of moonlight and in the grass soaked with blood.

‘I think so,’ the fire-haired fairy says. His eyes are scrying-crystals and the stars have all begun to die in tandem, like a celestial requiem. ‘I’m not su-supposed to hunt our kind.’

There is blood on Hinata’s hands. It isn’t human, and, _by the Queen,_ that makes Kenma delirious with relief. His sword stays sheathed at his side. He didn’t know, when he made his way here from the ruins of the Old City, if this night would be the last they would ever have.

‘I’m broken,’ Hinata says, and maybe it is the truth. His skin is cracked in a hundred places so that the awful hunger inside him leaks through, and the ground beneath him is singed. Nothing will ever grow there. The threads between the earth and the Flowers have been severed, and never again shall any of the Fair Folk dare to cross that blackened soil.

 _And so am I_ , Kenma thinks, because he is made of all the hundred million things he did not do.

‘There’s no one quite like you,’ Kenma tells him, and it is the truth. _I wished you into existence. I poured my blood into the Fall and it gave me you. I can turn a hundred fire-leaves into gold and I can grant the wildest of wishes but I cannot, can **never** tell you what I want to tell you. _‘That is not the same as being broken,’ he says out loud.

There are hot tears spilling from Hinata’s eyes now. ‘I couldn’t keep myself together,’ he chokes out. ‘It fell apart. It all fell apart. I lost - I forgot how to be Shouyou.’

Kenma wishes Hinata had listened when he warned him to stay home. There was rot in the air that morning, and it lingers still, stalking through the tall grass proud and full of the devastation it has wrought. This not the way the Hunt works. The Unseelie kill humans. The Seelie kill the Unseelie. And the red moon of the hunt dissolves into silver. Now the moon is broken, and there is Fae blood seeping into the soil, and it’s all _fucked._

‘I wanted to lose control,’ the red-haired changeling whimpers. ‘I always wanted to lose control. But it was _awful_ , awful, awful - Kageyama is dead and it’s all my fault and so is the other guy and I killed them both.’ His words dissolve into sobs and he rocks, back and forth, tiny and vulnerable and drowning in the tall grass.

‘Kageyama isn’t dead,’ Kenma says. ‘And you weren’t the one that killed the Spring fairy.’ He can still hear the echoes ringing through the quiet night air - a silver-edged blade singing as it enacts its master’s horrible justice.

But the truth does nothing to ease Hinata’s anguish and fear, and they might as well be at sea because Kenma is drowning drowning _drowning_ in his own incompetence.

‘But it was my fault,’ Hinata sobs into his hands. His tears fall fast and heavy and they smell like sulfur rising from hot springs.

Kenma should probably put his arms around Hinata, and give him something to cling to, something to anchor him - but he never knew how to do things like that. He wasn’t born with the sweet vocabulary or the warm arms of a compassionate lover, and no amount spent with his human family can remedy that. He is made of the hundred million things he does not do, and the lifetimes of emotions he will not let live in his expressions.

‘Let’s get you home,’ he says, as gently as he knows how.

Kenma knows where he belongs, knows that he has always been a part of the forest where the leaves turn butter-yellow and tangerine and crimson, knows the gold-light inside his chest, knows that he will always be welcome among the Troop even if he never wanted to be part of it. He knows that his human mother will always have her door and her heart open for him, and his bed will always be warm and the house full of his favorite things. He knows that he has a home both with the Fair Folk and with the human world. But where is Hinata’s home? Is it with the strange, angry-faced mage Pair? Or with his human mother and sister? Where was the place that formed him out of hunger and anger and limitless power?

Because Fae do not leave the earth black and ravaged, incapable of cradling magic or life ever again.

Monsters do.

\---

Tobio has not had a hot shower in months. Maybe even longer. He stands under the spray and pushes his hair out of his eyes and feels the wild rush of the river leave his body. His muscles scream in relief as the warmth works out the knots and soothes the old scars he ignores, mostly successfully. He thinks about the deep valley of death and the way it seemed almost like home, like the endless stretch of impossibly flat land and the jagged god-mountains that loomed beyond, about the sting of thunder and the silence beneath dark, endless sky. And then the world slipping back into focus. Kei’s grim expression, blood on his hands, silver knife flashing. Sugawara’s pale face wrecked by concern.

Tobio thinks about the silverwater aftertaste of Sugawara’s spell clinging like morning dew to his lips.

_Sugawara._

_Kind, gentle, sweet Sugawara. Made of moonlight. Made of things delicate and pure. Flowers in the prairie, dipped in starshine._

Tobio turns off the water and stares at the ridiculously fluffy towel Sugawara prepared for him. It is cleaner than anything he’s ever known. There are clothes too - a sweater that is soft and fluffy and pants that will probably fit him, and warm socks to cover his pale feet. He dries off and dresses gingerly, haunted by the ghost of his torturous murder down by the river. He picks his knives up from where he set them by the sink and weaves a new strap into existence. Their weight is familiar against his ribs. He looks at himself in the mirror, his hair unruly and exhaustion etched into his pointy features. The beginnings of an spidery inkblot are beginning to form over his chest on the sweater.

 _Friendship is not a curse_.

‘But I am,’ whispers Tobio, except this time, he believes it a little less.

Sugawara is sitting on the sofa by the fire, because of course they have the sort of home with a fireplace, Daichi and Sugawara, in a building with a courtyard and a balcony with perennials growing in terracotta pot plants. Sugawara cups a steaming mug in his hands. Another mug sits on the coffee table, patiently awaiting Tobio’s arrival. Soft, gentle music plays from a charmed harp on the mantle above the fireplace. As Tobio approaches the sofa, Sugawara turns and smiles up at him.

‘Isn’t the hot water just amazing?’ he beams.

‘Uh, yes,’ Tobio stammers. He feels out of place in the middle of all these comforting, domestic spells bustling away, keeping the apartment clean and warm and smelling like night-blooming flowers. He sits down and drinks the tea. It tastes like flowers in the prairie, dipped in starshine.

He looks at Sugawara as the silver-haired mage turns back to the fire.

They are both mages, aren’t they? But Sugawara is everything Tobio can never be, calming and graceful and useful to _all_ members of the Hunt - not just one reckless, red-haired, vicious little shit. He glitters with starlight magic, and Tobio is a sinkhole and everything he touches will stain with his darkness - even the warm colors of Sugawara’s clothes have been dipped in inky blue-black. Everyone likes Sugawara. Nobody likes Kageyama.

Nobody _needs_ Kageyama.

And yet the yearning in his chest does not feel like envy - envy does not twist this way, clockwise beneath his sternum and up into his lungs, dangerously close to the heart he probably doesn’t have. The _something else_ shudders inside him and it feels like magic and horror at the same time.

The shuddering makes a home inside of him as he watches the way the amber glow of the fireplace curves over the beauty-mark on Sugawara’s cheek. The older mage’s skin looks as smooth as polished stone. He wonders if it would feel cold or warm under his lips, and then he is terrified about wondering if it would feel cold or warm under his lips.

‘Stay tonight,’ the silver-haired mage says to the tongues of flame licking coal and firewood in the hearth. ‘Don’t go back out there.’

‘But Hinata-’

‘Kei is with him,’ Sugawara cuts him off. He turns, his dark eyes locking onto Kageyama’s. ‘The Wild Hunt is not made of any single Fae. It calls to all of us, and all of us ride together.’ His expression softens. ‘I understand that he is your Pair, but Kei is a Shield Crow, and he’ll watch Hinata’s back. This is what he does.’

Tobio looks down into his mug. ‘This is my fault,’ he says. ‘Oikawa was only after me, not Hinata. Not any of you.’

‘And what?’ Sugawara asks calmly. His hand settles, feather-light, on Tobio’s shoulder. ‘Let me ask you something, Kageyama. If it was Hinata who picked a fight with another fairy, would you leave him to be beaten by a pulp?’

Tobio clicks his tongue in irritation. ‘What the - _of course not!_ I wouldn’t leave that moron alone, even if it was his own stupid fault.’ He doesn’t bother telling the silver-haired mage how many times he’s _already_ had to stick his neck out because Hinata did something monumentally stupid.

‘And if I was the one dying by the river,’ Sugawara says, ‘would you just watch and let it happen?’

Tobio’s gut lurches sickeningly. Suddenly he can’t wipe the image from his mind: Sugawara’s silver hair splayed against dark pebbles, the smooth expanse of his cheek cracked like fractured china, blood running from his open chest and filling the grey river with crimson. No more light laughter. No more bright smiles. No more _well done, I’m so proud of you, you’re all doing so wonderfully,_ no more soft hands and careful weaving looping around his wrists. Tobio’s hands shake so badly he has to put down the mug before he scalds himself.

‘That’s different,’ he manages to choke out.

Sugawara’s eyes are fathomless. ‘Is it?’ he asks softly. ‘You don’t know how I felt, watching you die like that. I’ll never let that happen again, do you hear me? Never,’ he says, and that single word is different somehow. It echoes around them as though spoken in a cavern far below filled with underground lakes and secret creatures lurking in the deep.

There is a thread of a spell drifting between them. Out of pure instinct, Tobio grasps at it with his own lightning-sharp threads. His mouth fills with sweet springwater and his lungs feel full of winter-crisp air.

Sugawara gasps, slightly, and then covers his mouth. Sugawara shakes his head, and the feeling is gone before Tobio knows how to react. He smiles his usual bright smile and pats Tobio’s shoulder lightly. ‘Never mind, never mind,’ he laughs. ‘You should get some rest.’

Tobio frowns. ‘Okay,’ he says, but he feels like he missed something important.

The fire crackles merrily. Tobio is exhausted. It’s been a long night - from piss-scented tunnel to riverside. He wants to sleep, and Sugawara’s couch looks so comfortable, and the tea must have something potent in it because he feels his eyelids grow heavy. Maybe dying will do that to you - tire you out so far you forget how to be cold and hostile and sharp and alone.

Maybe there will be a price for this too. But Sugawara pulls a blanket over him and finds him a pillow, and the fire is warm and finally, _finally_ , Tobio sleeps.

\--

Kenma stands in front of the abandoned carousel in the empty part of the park. The metal horses were once painted gold and white, but now the paint flecks off, baring the deep blood red and rusted metal beneath. The mirrors are half-dull with age and eaten by black splotches. Above the mirrors, a tranquil pastoral scene has been painted in delicate greens and blues just below the round roof of the carousel. One upon a time, the swirling red and white pattern at the top of the carousel would have made it look like a spinning top from above. Now, it is entirely covered with rotting leaves and scattered twigs.

Kenma kneels before the carousel and dusts away the brown leaves from the carousel’s base. He sees the engraving there, just at the edge of the spinning platform, of the name of the man who made this fantastic machine. There is not a single smidge of iron on the carousel. It is a marvelous, magicked thing made of heaven-steel dressed up as something harmless. There is a stream that runs underground just beneath the carousel. If one sits on the carousel and goes round and round and up and down, they will soon end up crossing the stream once, twice, and then thrice.

Cross a stream thrice and you shall find yourself in a different world entirely. Beneath the carousel, beyond the stream that glitters over the diamond bridge, lies a magnificent descent past strange trees growing out of the rock face, sprouting flowers that smell like the softest, sweetest memories of childhood and fruit glistening like jewels. One bite from a fruit would mean never returning to the surface again.

There used to be stories of children going missing in the park, back when the carousel was still in operation. They said that there was something wrong with the way the ride was positioned, that parents couldn’t watch their kids properly, that it was unsafe and made children vulnerable to kidnappers. But these kidnappers never asked for a ransom. They never left a note. There was only silence, and the tears of parents mourning their children.

Soon after, the children would come back, but different, slightly. Something wrong with their eyes, or their voice, or maybe they would look at their parents too coldly. Some people would say that the children looked out at the world with souls too old to fit into their tiny bodies. It unsettled the people of the city deep into their bones.

Either way, the residents of the city blamed the carousel and its inferior design, and it was closed forevermore.

Kenma knows this place well. It was the place he had come to, to find his mother. But inside the ancient court With No Name, he had found nothing but old scattered bones and faceless statues wiped into anonymity by age. The enormous caverns were carved with the language of the first of the Fair Folk, back when they had other names and other shapes. All the fires had gone out and all the great halls full of feasting tables and treasure lay silent and empty. Sometimes Kenma comes back, when he is in need of something greater and a million times more ancient to soothe his nerves. He knows that the fairies of the court With No Name are long gone, either absorbed into the four courts of the Seasons, or else bred out of existence into mage families, or else hunted down and killed in the early cannibalistic days of the Hunt.

Still, he likes to think there are age-old fairy ghosts watching over him, guiding his hand to better things.

‘What are you doing here?’ says a quiet, cold voice behind him.

Kenma turns. A tall, blond man is standing behind him. He is wearing a thick grey parka and his jeans are a little faded with age, and his glasses are square and plain, to match his plain, if not slightly angular, face. He seems a little too boring. Which means that his glamor must be stronger than most, because there is no way a human would be wearing a pair of glasses that heavily enchanted.

‘Don’t I know you?’ Kenma remarks.

‘I sincerely doubt it,’ the blond man says. His voice is ice.

‘My name is Kenma,’ the shorter man attempts. ‘Kenma Kozume.’

‘Kenma,’ the stranger pronounces. ‘Kozume.’ Then, slowly, the blond narrows his eyes and tilts his head. Something like recognition thaws the frost in his expression, but only ever so slightly.

Kenma can still feel the Winter clutch at his heart from the look in the stranger’s eye. He has never felt magic like this. This is not bottomless magic, not like Kenma’s own, that comes from the earth below and can be channeled forth through intent and spells. This is the sort of magic that is _created_. It blossoms out of certain creatures, erupting from their magical center and flooding the air with power, and spreads out into the ground and the rocks and makes things _alive_ in a way that they had not been before.

Maybe Kenma is wrong. Maybe the fairies of the court With No Name are still alive after all.

‘You’re the leaf-fairy Hinata is obsessed about,’ the strange fairy states. ‘You’re kinda small in person.’ He doesn't say this like an insult. If anything, he sounds intrigued, maybe even impressed. He burrows his hands into the pockets of his parka and stands with his feet shoulder-width apart.

Defensive.

Ready to raise a shield or block any oncoming attack.

Ah. Shield-Crow. Kenma allows himself the tiniest hint of a smile. He should have figured earlier - of course Kuroo wanted to check out the defense. More importantly, Kenma can just about glimpse the eerie beauty simmering just behind the thick veil of glamor, the sort of unearthly perfection that would frighten most onlookers. The taste of Winter air in his mouth and the scent of burnt pine and cider is enough to tell him precisely what kind of Fae the strange man is.

‘And you’re that Crow Kuro has a crush on,’ Kenma says, nodding slightly. ‘Does he know what you are?’

The strange man clicks his tongue, loud and sharp like the sound of a bird’s beak snapping shut. ‘He does now,’ he says. Irritation lifts his smooth voice and colors it with golden sparks.

Kenma smiles a little more. ‘I notice you didn’t say anything about the crush.’

‘It’s not a crush,’ the fairy shrugs. ‘He calls it reconnaissance.’

Kenma mirrors the other fairy’s shrug. ‘If you say so,’ he offers. ‘But I’ve known Kuro for a long time. His idea of reconnaissance is to ask a dead body questions after he has stuck his sword through it. If he was after you, you would be dead by now.’

The stranger arches an eyebrow. ‘And yet,’ he says, indicating his perfect condition.

Kenma nods. ‘And yet.’

The Shield-Crow gestures towards the carousel. ‘What are you doing with that?’ he asks again. ‘Are you trying to get into the Palace Beneath? Because there is an easier way, if you want. I need to get something from down there anyways. You can come with me.’

Kenma blinks, taken aback. ‘You would let me enter the court With No Name?’ he asks. It is unheard of, for Seelie and Unseelie to invite each other into the carefully guarded and protected areas of their respective homes.

The Shield-Crow gives him a long look that would have made anyone else feel like an idiot, except Kenma isn’t anyone else, so it slides off him like water off a duck’s back.

‘Of course,’ he says, already striding to the leaning oak to the left of the carousel. ‘And it has a name. Many names, even.’

Kenma watches in mild amazement as the blond-haired fairy raps his bare knuckles against the gnarled trunk of the oak. The knots on the bark untwist and twist again, like the rippling surface of a dark river. A soft, whispering groan sounds above them in the trunks of the trees, up to the thinnest branches now bare against the grey sky. The body of the tree yawns open, revealing a dark hole in the core of the tree that is probably not really a tree but a very convincing glamor or a wood-nymph who has grown too old to move anymore.

‘What do you call the court With No Name?’ Kenma asks, even though this is another thing he should not look at, should not pursue, should not follow.

A strange, bittersweet smile plays on the blond fairy’s lips. The dull edge of his glamor falls off, and suddenly he is all gold and silver and shimmering magic, too beautiful to look at. He is the sun, and the light that falls from the moon in the deadliest night, and the ripples of light that ricochet off jewels.

‘I call it home,’ he says, and disappears into the dark opening of the oak.

The descent is usually pitch black. This time, the trees are alight with pink and white lights, as though all the flowers have turned to flame, and magical fire burns in the hollows in the walls. The stairs glint with all the colors of an opal beneath their feet as Kenma follows the blond fairy further down into the court With No Name. Each cavern they pass lights up with life and color, revealing large rooms full of woven tapestries with glowing flowers and animals that blink and watch as the two men pass by. Archways stretch overhead into the enormous chimney above them, the runes now glowing gold with newly-awakened magic. He can feel the threads of magic woven carefully into every rock and jewel of this place, and how it sparks from slumbering coal to an inferno by the mere brush of the blond fairy’s magic. Kenma feels his throat flutter with fear and admiration.

He has never been in the presence of anything so powerful in his life, and he has knelt at the feet of Fairy Kings and Queens.

The stairs that wind around and around the walls of the enormous chimney finally reach the floor of the cave. All the rooms have been ignored, all the feast halls and tables and thrones and beautiful relics passed by without even a second glance from the Shield-Crow.

He has come only for one purpose.

Because of the chimney of the underground court, a large circular floor opens up at the foot of the stairs. The cave’s naturally lumpy surface has been polished flat and carved to resemble an intricate knot of winding thorns. At the center of the cave floor, where the thorns begin, there stands a statue made of spun glass so delicate it might as well have been sugar, or ice. A tall, breathtaking figure has been formed out of the vulnerable material, its hands clasping a silver-edged elfin sword. The glass man is clearly an elf. That much is obvious from his impossibly beautiful features and his long, pointed ears, and his elegant, long frame. His hair looks to be long and gently curled, cascading down to his waist.

There is something familiar in the statue’s crystal-spun features. Kenma cannot quite grasp its meaning.

At least, not until Tsukishima lets his glamor fall completely away, and Kenma finds himself looking at two identical faces, one glass and one made of flesh and blood.

 _Holy fucking shit_.

‘What did you come here for?’ Kenma asks. His voice murmurs over the glass and the echoing chimney walls like the underground river far above them, whispering over the diamond bridge.

The Shield-Crow who is not actually a Crow at all looks up at the glass statue. His eyes are more dazzling than the glare of the sun.

‘I needed to remember something,’ he says. His voice does not echo. It does not even sound like a voice, the way that a voice should sound if it comes from a throat made of flesh and sinew and bone and blood. Instead, it is the sound of a distant bell tolling beyond fields and fields of golden wheat bending in the soft sunset in mid-Fall.

Kenma steps carefully away, for fear of being singed by the waves and waves of power pouring from the blond fairy.

‘And what were you trying to remember?’

The blond smiles at Kenma. His eyes are empty and full all at once, full of death and life and the end and the eternity that follows. ‘That to want anything beyond what is permitted is to invite death. It is to end up with that sword,’ he says, pointing at the blade clasped in the statue’s hands, ‘separating your head from your body.’ His smile fades, and what is left is perhaps more terrifying in its devastating sorrow. ‘I would be careful, forest-fairy. It will hurt you in ways you can never imagine.’

Kenma looks away, because he always looks away.

All he ever does is look away. ‘I know,’ he whispers. ‘But isn’t it worth it?’

‘No,’ says the Shield-Crow who is not a Crow. ‘It never is.’

The glamor falls over him slow and thick, and suddenly they are just two men staring at each other in a dark hall, reflecting each other’s shattered hearts.

‘I wish you the best with your sins,’ the fairy says softly, almost kindly. The sharp edges of his face have all softened away. He is magnificent in his devastating sorrow. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ he adds, waving his hand around them at the decaying tomb of the forgotten court. ‘I’ve seen what I came to see.’

And with one last sad smile, the fairy begins his climb up the stairs to the surface world.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow what a hiatus.  
> For everyone who's still here and everyone who's stuck around - THANK YOU SO MUCH! This past year has been so intense and so exhausting that it took me forever to find the passion and mental energy to write again.  
> I hope it doesn't feel too wobbly to be reading this. Chapters don't want to come out the way I originally wrote them last year and certain scenes keep getting pushed back - but the upside is, ch 10 and ch 11 are half-written!


	10. Interlude: The Static In the Air Before the Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A brief interlude, in which there are donuts, panic, and a rapid unraveling of our favorite character.

Humans as a race are, without a doubt, made of geniuses. Why? Because they invented donuts. Fried dough. Fried cake. Chocolate flavored, chocolate covered, chocolate filled, cream-filled, jam-filled, twisty ones, peanut-covered ones, ones that join up in little pieces and have _different fillings_ , holy fucking shit, donuts. Better yet - they have places that sell donuts _at any time of day_ anywhere you want, without even having to get out of your car.

Kuroo sits by himself in the early morning fog on a park bench and marvels at his cardboard box of donuts. This is why he left the halls of the Goblin King. This is why he joined the Trooping Fairies. This is why he ventures out into the human world on early weekday mornings before anyone has the right to be awake.

Mother. Fucking. _Donuts._

He shoves the last bit of fried cake in his mouth and moans happily to himself. Kuroo flicks the box into the air, willing the wind to pick it up. The paper box flips up and up and up in the air across the width of the path, before dropping rather suddenly into the trash can opposite to the bench. He clicks his fingers and points, double-barrel, at the trash can. _Ace._

‘You’re an idiot,’ Kenma says from behind him, nearly causing Kuroo to jump out of his skin.

‘Shit, dude,’ Kuroo gasps, pressing his hand over his hammering heart. ‘You scared me!’

Kenma sits down beside him on the bench and levels a look at him. ‘You didn’t save me any donuts,’ he says disapprovingly. He slips his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. ‘I’m hungry.’

Kuroo digs a chocolate bar out of his pocket, rips the packet and hands it over. Kenma takes the chocolate from him with one hand as he pulls out his phone with the other. Kuroo finds himself another chocolate bar, except this one has almonds in it, and he’s not entirely sure if he likes almonds, so he trades it for Kenma’s. Kenma doesn’t seem to care very much. They are well-rehearsed in each other’s habits.

‘Your boyfriend killed a human last night,’ Kenma says, rather suddenly.

‘Boyfriend? Ah, I wish,’ Kuroo whistles.

He kind of does wish that his brush with Tsukishima is something more than a kiss and a horrifying message delivered by an ancient Fae living under a tree. He wants to crack that stony mask and that cold exterior. He knows Tsukishima shines like a million gold stars condensed in a single body, but he is wrapped up so tight in his self-made prison that his light will forever be eclipsed. He wants to climb inside of Tsukishima and learn all his secrets so that he can teach him how not to be afraid, because Tsukishima seems like the kind of person who has been afraid for so long that he dug a deep moat around his heart and now no one can cross for fear of the crocodile-teeth snapping in the water. Goblins don’t kill easy, though, and Kuroo is willing to die in pursuit of what he wants.

Things were somewhat less complicated before he saw the blond fairy nursing his whiskey, electric lights turning his strange eyes gold and silver. Kuroo feels as though it’s been years instead of a few nights.

Kenma looks up at the goblin, his lips thin and his pupils mere slits in his golden cat-eyes. ‘Do you know what the Shield Crow is?’ he asks seriously.

‘I think I have a pretty good idea, yeah.’

Kenma’s expression is unreadable, but as his eyes flash quickly over Kuroo’s, face whatever he finds there makes him shake his head sharply. ‘But you can’t stay away,’ he states as though it’s a fact. He narrows his eyes fractionally. ‘You don’t want to stay away.’

Kuroo smiles but it tastes bitter in his mouth. ‘Yep,’ he says, forcing a cheerful tone to his voice that Kenma will see through anyways. Kuroo flicks his eyes towards the smaller fairy, taking in the dark circles beneath his eyes. ‘How about your redhead?’ he asks.

Kuroo knows what Kenma looks like when he gets excited about something, because Kenma doesn’t get excited very often. Sure, he likes being a part of the trooping fairies, but he only ever gets excited when they are about to trap a particularly dangerous Crow, one who has fought tooth and nail and evades them with the viciousness of a wild fox. He also gets excited when he unpacks a new game and plugs it into his console, and then he locks himself away for the whole weekend only to emerge having beaten it and left with nothing but apathy.

Everything else was _boring_ and _ugh, I guess I’ll do it,_ or _fine, Kuroo, if you want to, I guess_. Except then Shouyou Hinata came along.

And Kenma was _always_ excited about Hinata.

And that excitement softened at the edges and turned into something strange and deep. Something that would inevitably hurt Kenma.

‘I got him home,’ Kenma replies. His eyes are sad and there are heavy circles bruised beneath them. ‘He isn’t what we thought he was. He isn’t what I thought he was.’ He rubs his fingers around the corners of his phone, biting the edge of his lip lightly.

Kuroo knows what it looks like when Kenma’s hurting.

He knows they are like night and day, but Kenma is his oldest and truest friend, and he bends himself backwards doing anything and everything he can to keep Kenma from ever being hurt. Except this time, they are both hurting, and the hurt is a runaway train hurtling towards them with the brakes broken and the driver murdered, and they are tied onto the tracks with their fingers broken.

Kuroo tips his head back and sighs heavily. ‘It’s been a tough couple of days, huh,’ he murmurs.

Kenma’s face brightens with the tiniest of smiles. ‘I don’t think it’s going to get much better,’ he says.

Kuroo grunts in agreement. He sits back up straight and runs his hands through his hair, letting himself brush his hands briefly over his horns soothingly. ‘I think we should have beer for lunch,’ he announces with a firm nod. ‘And fish fry. And apple pie. Wait, no. Not beer,’ he decides, inspiration striking.

Kenma makes a face. ‘You’re going to turn the sweet soju into fucking pixie-honey again, aren’t you?’ he accuses. ‘You greater horned _idiot_.’

Kuroo starts to voice his retort but breaks off as he notices a figure appear down the path, solidifying out of the fog. He recognizes the loping gait, the sleek grey hair, and the gold-embroidered white uniform. As the newcomer draws near, his glowing green eyes cast an eerie light onto his angular features.

‘Here comes the new recruit,’ Kuroo says out loud, nudging Kenma with his elbow. He waves as the figure approaches. ‘Probably snuck away from sparring again. Yaku’s going to have an aneurysm.’ He starts to chuckle, thinking of how extremely angry their fellow trooping fairy is going to be when he finds out.

‘Hm, sure. Oh, right, did you think Oikawa was dead?’ Kenma frowns, peering down into his phone as though it is some kind of oracle. ‘When Lev gave me your message. You told Lev to tell me that the mage in the Spring Court was dead.’

‘Huh?’ the wild-haired fairy utters, confused. ‘Who now?’

‘Because Oikawa is definitely still alive,’ Kenma continues, unperturbed. ‘The Spring Prince is dead. Not the mage.’

Kuroo feels like they are having two completely different conversations. ‘No, I know it was the prince - _wait_.’ He shakes his head. ‘Wait just a fucking minute,’ he says slowly.

He whips his head towards the grey-haired fairy, who is guiltily trying to hide his tall frame behind the trash can despite having zero shapeshifting abilities.

‘Lev,’ Kuroo barks. ‘Lev, you _fucking moron._ ’

The young Trooping fairy yelps from behind the trash can as large clods of frost-hardened soil begin flinging themselves at him at Kuroo’s command. A flying tree branch hits him squarely in the forehead as he tries to evade the onslaught of dirt and mud.

‘Of course you got that wrong, you defective, oversized lump,’ Kuroo groans. ‘I don’t know what else I expected. You’d think ogre and elf would be a fatal combination. But no. What we have here is a really tall, really scary _child_. Where do I refund this gift? I want to speak to customer service.’

‘That’s mean,’ Kenma notes, but he’s already smiling.

He flicks his wrist and a slimy, wet leaf smacks the grey-haired fairy in the face. As the grey-haired halfling tries to dodge another pack of rotting leaves, a twig lands straight between his eyes, stunning him momentarily. He dives out of the way, covering his pointed ears.

‘You _guys_ ,’ Lev complains, his voice taking on a whine that doesn’t suit his enormous build in the slightest. ‘Why are you picking on _me?_ ’

‘Because you suck,’ says Kenma with brutal honesty. But he relents, and with a wave of his hand, the onslaught ceases.

Kuroo rubs his hands through his hair roughly and stretches out his limbs. He’s too fucking tired for this, but he’s been dodging his duties all night running after a Shield Crow under the pretense of _reconnaissance_ , and the whole world is falling to pieces. He gets up from his seat and shoves his hands into his jacket pockets.

‘Alright, then,’ he sighs. ‘No avoiding it.’ He throws a sidelong glance at Kenma, whose expression turns grim. ‘I think it’s time we report to our Queen.’

\--

Tadashi Yamaguchi is perhaps the least impressive person alive. And he has been alive for a very, very, very long time.

He isn’t a knight. He isn’t a dancer or a weaver. He doesn’t have a single drop of royal blood running through his veins. If you cut his skin, his blood will run crimson and not silver or gold. He usually loses in a fight, if it’s close combat, and his glamor is half-assed at best. Just yesterday he was beaten to a pulp by a pixie. _A pixie!_

In a way, being unimpressive and unassuming is part of why he was able to slip far enough under the radar. There are so few of them left alive now. Every so often, when he sees the way Sugawara dances as he weaves his spells for Daichi to use, he feels a flurry of relief. Of homesickness.

However, there is one thing he’s good at above everything else and everyone else - and that is being Kei Tsukishima’s best friend. He’s been Kei’s best friend for centuries upon centuries now, since they were both mere younglings playing in the long corridors in the Court of the Sun, swimming in the great crystalline lakes with ancient water-horses, and weaving sun-spells idly together on long, warm afternoons. Except, of course, these days they go down to the coffee shop to have dinner and exchange books, or else Tadashi visits Kei on his lunch break and they wander the museum halls together looking at all the long-dead creatures. Sometimes, they go down by the river and skip black pebbles into its rushing depths, and Tadashi laughs as Kei makes snarky comments about Hinata and Kageyama.

Tadashi loves the sunshine, light-hearted things he does with Kei.

But he’s been there for the darkness too.

Tadashi was the one who found Kei in the forest curled into a ball, his diamond tears now running crimson as he waited to die beside his brother’s cold body. He was the one who had cut the poor woman’s body down from where it hung in the trees for the Unseelie Queen’s crows to peck from. He was the one who buried the two bodies beneath a young hawthorn - and then, a hundred years later, when everyone else had forgotten what had been done to Akiteru, he was the one who moved their bones down into the Old Court and finally built a tomb suitable for a fallen prince.

Tadashi was the one who had to hold his friend as he wept for a hundred days and a hundred nights, his body too small to contain such grief. He was the one who watched, helpless, as Kei stuck tiny iron hoops in his ears and then smiled at the pain - like somehow, he deserved to hurt. The one who helped Kei pick out a pair of glasses he could layer with enchantment after enchantment to drink in his power - to keep the glamor wrapped tight around him.

Kei used to be the fucking sun burning in the sky, and the moon too, life and death and the river that runs between - and now he is falling ash over the empty streets of his ruined heart. And yet - for that one brief moment last night Kei stood tall among the black-feathered Crows. Kei was so magnificent, sharp dark edges and glimmering gold, his voice like a distant bell. It was like Tadashi’s best friend was back, chasing away the heavy clouds of his ghost.

Tadashi doesn’t glow like that. Not even close. He has no royal elfin blood in his veins. And he doesn’t care. He already has one thing he’s good at - one thing that _nobody else_ can do. Tadashi Yamaguchi is Kei’s best friend.

But now Kei is missing - _and has been missing for nearly two days_ \- and he hasn’t had a single text or call or even glimpse of Kei. If he manages to slip away from the Crows, he doesn’t know where he would start looking.

Even without Daichi glaring him down from the opposite side of the table, Tadashi would be drowning in his own sea of guilt and shame. Funnily enough, though, being the sole focus of Daichi’s rage seems to be helping with the nausea.

‘What do you mean,’ Daichi grits out through clenched teeth, ‘ _you don’t know where Tsukishima is_?’

Tadashi twists his hands in his lap miserably. Daichi called an emergency meeting first thing in the morning at their coffee shop, after everyone had some time to rest to deal with the fallout of the horrendously messy evening. When he realized both Hinata and Tsukishima were still missing, his worry had splintered into fury. Hinata is easy enough to track, leaking magic all over the place the way he usually does.

But Kei is fucking excellent at glamoring himself. If he doesn’t want to be found, nobody can find him. Not even Tadashi.

‘I mean, I don’t know,’ Tadashi says, glancing up at Daichi. ‘He’s not at home. He’s not at work.’ He digs his hands into his legs, trying not to burst into hysterical tears. ‘Look, he’s been hiding from the entire Underworld since before you were born, Daichi. He knows every trick in the book, and then some.’

Tadashi checked Kei’s apartment last night, but nobody was there. All the lights were off. The golden threads of his enchantment hung over all his apartment like hundreds of tiny curtains, warding away enemies and keeping his belongings safe. A book sits open, face-down, on the couch as though Kei left in the middle of reading it. The beady black eyes of his dinosaur figurines watched Tadashi impassively. There was no note. No indication of where he might be.

The bell rings gently as the door to the coffee shop opens. Sugawara and a hooded figure dressed all in black step in through the door, kicking snow off their shoes. Sugawara catches sight of Tadashi and waves at him, his sweet features brightening with a smile. Daichi jabs a finger at Tadashi and mouths _this isn’t over_ , before turning around to the door. The tight line of his shoulders immediately relaxes as he catches sight of Sugawara. Behind the silver-haired fairy, the hooded figure pulls down the hood of his jacket, revealing a familiar scowl.

_Kageyama._

‘Look who’s alive,’ whistles Tanaka from his seat amongst the other Hounds. He waves over the young mage with a wide grin. ‘Let me buy you a coffee.’

‘No spiking the coffee with whiskey,’ Sugawara warns the rambunctious Hounds. ‘He’s still coming off some very complicated spellwork.’

‘I wouldn’t want whiskey anyways,’ Kageyama frowns. He wanders off to the counter to order himself a coffee. Something about him seems less sharp around the edges, less haunted, like he’s stopped watching his back all the time.

Tadashi suspects it has a lot to do with a certain silver-haired fairy.

Sugawara slides in neatly beside Tadashi. His magic hums comfortingly at Tadashi’s periphery, smelling like lilies that once blossomed in a garden long since dead. It took Tadashi a lot longer to figure out what Sugawara is than he wants to admit. Of course, it’s always harder to tell with mages. Even if hundreds of years have passed, human blood has its own way of obscuring a bloodling’s Kin, like smoke drifting over water. It’s obvious that Sugawara draws his powers from the moon - unlike the rest of the Crows, his powers dwindle somewhat under the bloodmoon, when the silver rays are tainted with the predatory song of the Hunt. Eventually, Tadashi realized that Sugawara was not always a mage, even if he plays the part of Pair so well.

Sugawara is the last weaver left alive.

‘Yamaguchi,’ Daichi says sharply, jerking Tadashi rudely out of his thoughts. ‘Focus. You can’t sit there and tell me you don’t know. You have to know, damnit.’

‘Now, now, Daichi,’ Sugawara reprimands gently. ‘Yamaguchi is already sick with worry. Imagine if I went missing. How would you feel?’

Daichi sighs heavily, the anger melting quickly out of his features. ‘You’re right.’ He rubs the bridge of his nose, his glamor flickering as his exhaustion finally takes over. Tadashi catches a brief glimpse of horned brows and blood-red eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, the hard edge of his voice softening. ‘I’m sure you looked everywhere you could. It’s easy to forget, you know, that you and Tsukishima aren’t like the other newcomers.’

Tadashi nods slowly. ‘It’s okay,’ he smiles weakly. ‘I’ll keep thinking of places he might have gone.’

‘Thank you,’ Sugawara says seriously, placing his moonlight-pale hand on Tadashi’s forearm.

Daichi’s solemn nod mirrors the silver-haired fairy’s sentiment.

Meanwhile, Kageyama returns from the counter with a steaming cup held carefully in his pale hands. He sits down with the Hounds and manages something that looks more like a grimace than a smile when Tanaka pats him on the shoulder amicably. He pulls his mobile phone from his pocket and scrolls through his messages with a look of intense concentration. He seems to find what he’s looking for. He sets his phone down on the table, face-up, and slides it over to the closest Hound. Asahi peers down at the message, his dark brow growing heavy. He passes the phone over to the other two Hounds.

‘His university?’ Nishinoya says out loud. ‘After everything that happened last night?’

‘He never misses morning classes,’ Kageyama tells the Hounds. ‘But if he isn’t there, then he’ll be cycling somewhere between the university and the city. He likes to cycle when he gets agitated.’ He shifts in his seat, wrapping his hands around his mug of mocha. ‘I can come with you-’

‘Forget it, kid,’ Tanaka says, cutting him off with a quick swipe of his hand. ‘You’re in no shape.’

‘Leave it to us old men,’ Nishinoya announces, jerking his thumb towards his chest. The pixie’s already spiked-up hair seems to puff up like a cockatoo’s head crest. ‘We’ll find Hinata. After all, we’re the Hounds of the Hunt. There’s nobody better at tracking than us.’

‘Seriously, though,’ Tanaka adds, leaning over his friend. ‘It’s gonna be okay. Take care of yourself first. Or else,’ he says, winking very obviously, ‘Suga over there is going to murder us.’

Sugawara’s smile is equal measures honey-sweet and poisonous. ‘That’s right. I’ll kill you.’

Tadashi shudders. With or without a loom from the Moon Garden, he never wants to induce a weaver’s fury. They’re so inventive. It’s horrible.

Sugawara leans in close, so close that his sweet perfume surrounds Tadashi in a hazy cloud. His fingers burn like frost through the thick cable-knit wool of Tadashi’s sweater. ‘Yamaguchi,’ the silver-haired weaver whispers to him, ‘do you think Kei might have gone home?’

Tadashi whips his head around to meet Sugawara’s deep brown eyes. ‘To the Old Court?’ _No_. His heart flutters in his throat: a frightened blackbird desperate to flee from the bogwater rising within his lungs, threatening to drown them both. ‘He wouldn’t. It’s not safe. Unless-’ he breaks off. ‘ _But he wouldn’t_. Not with the curse. He can’t use it, or he’ll die.’

He knows he isn’t making any sense, but it wouldn’t make any difference because nobody can stop Kei now. The blood that runs through Kei’s veins demands that he fight, even if fighting will end up with his body broken, his glassy eyes staring up at the falling snow. The Old Ways demand Kei’s servitude, and because Kei is royal and ancient and made of sun and moon, he must obey. But Kei has a horrible curse stabbing into his soul every time he uses even a tiny bit more magic than he is allowed, forever a prisoner of his Queen’s curse. Those seven half-moons imprinted into his once pearl-smooth skin are a punishment designed specifically to prevent him from revolting against the Unseelie Queen and taking revenge for his murdered family and the slaughter of his Kin.

Tadashi’s pulse thunders in his ears and his stomach is full of black-winged insects that bite at his lungs and make it impossible to breathe, impossible to think, because suddenly he is running through the midnight woods, up to his waist in the snow, blind with fear that his best friend is dead, _and there is a body hanging in the tree and a severed head lying in a pool of ruby-red, and an elf-prince is curled up with his arms ruined with curse-burns, and the moon is lost in a shroud of clouds as the sky in all its vastness and endlessness mourns._

‘Use what?’ Sugawara demands, his voice still lowered. His grip is like iron on Tadashi’s arm, but the younger fairy can’t feel it anyhow.

If the Order is broken - and it _is_ broken - and if Kei managed to summon a sword of the moon, then he will need one last piece to fight. Kei must fight. He doesn’t have a choice. _He is a son of his father’s court, of his mother’s garden._

‘He’s gone to get his crown,’ Tadashi utters, loud enough for Daichi to hear.

Suga’s already pale face turns ashen. He knows what that means. He knows what it all means, because he must have felt the Order break too. ‘Fuck,’ he curses. ‘Fuck.’

‘What is it?’ Daichi demands. ‘What’s going on?’

Sugawara shakes his head at his Pair. ‘Tsukishima’s gone to the Court With No Name,’ he says, his voice strained. ‘If we’re lucky, he’s still there.’

‘And if we’re not?’ Daichi asks, alarmed.

‘Th-then he’s already found what he was looking for at the Old Court,’ Tadashi stammers out, his voice sounding shrill in his own ears. ‘And he’s going to challenge the Unseelie Queen to a duel.’

The head Crow’s expression darkens into thunderclouds. ‘ **Are you fucking KIDDING ME?!** ’

\--

They do find Hinata in the end.

His trail was easy to follow, once the Hounds of the Hunt knew where to look. He reeks of spilt oil, burnt flowers and fresh blood.

When they find him, Hinata is sitting at a bus stop with his head buried in his hands, whimpering to himself about cats and shadows and losing and love. His bicycle is piled up against the glass sides of the bus stop, crumpled like a piece of paper as though he was in a terrible collision. Maybe he was, but there isn’t a scratch on him.

They pick up the mangled carcass of his bike. The Hounds pull him out of his muttering with heavy hands, reckless jokes, and loud barks of laughter. He looks up at them, his eyes swallowed in gold, and he opens his mouth and bawls. When he weeps, his skin falling so loose that oil-slick darkness begins to seep out of his tattered edges, the Hounds gather around him and press their magic against him so that he might stay solid. They give him bars of chocolate and warm red-pork buns.

_I fucked up_ , the changeling tells them in between rib-breaking sobs.

_No,_ they murmur to him. _We did. You are not alone,_ they tell him. _You will never be alone. You are one of us._

_You are one of us._

Then they pick him up by his arms and help him on home, back to the city where the other Crows sit in the warm belly of a cafe that only ever caters to the creatures from Under the Hill - and the few university students too tired and stressed to notice they aren’t _totally_ welcome, _but fine, come in_.

A group of exhausted, over-caffeinated students drive past the bus stop two miles out from the university in their beaten-up sedan. One of them swears that he saw a small boy riding an enormous black dog, crying with his mouth open. It becomes a minor urban legend that circulates the university, in the backs of crowded lecture halls and in dark dormitories, until it eventually fades from memory, nothing more but a story to make freshmen shudder with delicious fear.

But there are many strange stories here. They say the city is built on old bones, and that crumbling corpse haunts the residents of the city still.

\--

The water is quiet and the river runs onwards, beneath the shadow of the bridge. The afternoon is strange and dark, and fog shrouds the city and muffles every sound. Tsukishima sits with his legs dangling off the edge, staring down at the black pebbled beach where Kageyama died last night. He turns a gold circlet over and over and over in his hands. His jacket lies crumpled behind him, stained dark with dried blood. For the first time in a long time, his arms are completely bare. His curse-burns are pink and tender from when he broke through their hard edges to summon his mother’s sword. He can taste blood on his tongue. His lungs are sandpaper-raw.

If he does what the Old Mother told him, he restores the Order. Or he might die. He can’t do the things he used to, as a child dressed in beautiful clothes and spun-glass armor. The curse-burns press against his power like a knife at his throat, a fatal warning against using the circlet.

But if he does nothing, then more and more people will die as the balance of things spin violently out of control.

Everything is slipping through his fingers like water. Kageyama died, then he came back, then Hinata fell apart, and then Tsukishima fell apart - and he killed a Fairy Prince.

Tsukishima looks at the golden circlet in his hands and tries not to remember, but the past flows fast and purposeful through him like the river rolling on beneath him.

_The leaves are turning. The glassy surface of the lake cradles bursts of crimson, canary-yellow, and rich tangerine. Golden flicker-fairies dance upon the lake surface like so many stars._

_It is a good year. The harvest moon will hang fat in the sky, and the Queen of the Lilies will weave her blessings at her loom and spread it over the place where the humans live. They will have good crops and their children will grow strong after the Winter passes. The Fair Folk of the seasonal Courts are fat and content from the milk and flowers left for them in fairy-rings, and any mischief played on the mortals will be humorous instead of malicious._

_Akiteru swings his silver-edged sword around him in graceful butterfly-loops, slicing the falling leaves into tiny pieces until they burst around him in flame-tinted confetti. His white and gold cloak blooms around him. In the distance, beneath a tree drooping heavy with silvery white fruit, his lover watches him with nectar fresh on her lips and moon-lilies braided into her hair. Kei sits not far from her, at the shores of the lake, weaving a sun-spell between his fingertips. He knows it has been very long since his brother’s lover has been above, and perhaps it will be forever before she can return to the surface._

_‘Come practice, Kei,’ the elf-prince calls._

_Kei ties together the strands of the spell, completing it. He drapes it over the mortal woman’s legs, giving her the gift of the sun here in the world beneath. She thanks him, her smile like honeydew and sunshine. Kei runs over to his brother through the grass. A shower of falling leaves dash after him, depositing orange leaves in his sun-wheat hair._

_Akiteru swings his sword in a lazy arc, back and forth. His long hair glows gold as tiny fairies flit about his brow like a living crown. He flashes a brilliant smile at his baby brother. ‘Moon or Sun?’ he asks, pointing his moon-sword at Kei._

_Kei falls into position - feet shoulder-width apart - and pulls the gold circlet off his head. It blinks in the light, then it isn’t a crown at all but a shimmering shield woven out of hundreds of gold strands._

_‘Sun,’ he says. His father’s shield vibrates with power in his hands._

_‘Wonderful,’ Akiteru says, his voice warm with praise, and he swings his blade in a flurry of movement._

In the grey-white world, Tsukishima drops the circlet into his lap. Even if the crown will not physically burn him, the memory does. If he uses it, he might die. If he uses it, he will be his father’s son again. He will be Kei again, happy and bright and laughing with his brother by the lake as the leaves turn.

There are tears in his eyes and his cheeks are wet. He aches deep inside from all the broken pieces that never healed properly. Lifetimes of clipping his wings somehow made him forget what it was like to witness Akiteru’s love.

It was like turning your head in time to catch the sunset’s orange glow, your eyes filled color and your body painted tiger-bright, and the whole world is made breathless by its touch from the blushing sky to the golden hues of everything that was once cold and grey and black. It was fucking _beautiful_ , so fucking terribly beautiful that it broke your heart over and over and over to know that you weren’t in love like that.

Tsukishima’s walls are in tatters and he does not know how to be the cold, mocking person he created. He knows what it feels like to want something, except in Tsukishima’s world, there are no more lilies drifting on a quiet lake, no more crowns to wear. There is just pain, and fear, and a kiss is never just a kiss, but _he wishes ardently he could go back and steal promises from Kuroo’s lips the way he stole kisses._

Because then he would have a sliver of what Akiteru had. Of what Akiteru was.

And he wouldn’t be so fucking alone. He wouldn’t be so fucking _exhausted._

The crime was not Akiteru’s for loving. The crime was with the cruelty that punished him for being capable of it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for how short this chapter is, guys. Think of it as an interlude before shit REALLY hits the fan.   
> Ch 11 is going to be pretty painful, and then ch 12 is going to be a very, very long emotional ride. AND WE AREN'T EVEN CLOSE TO FINISHING THIS WILD, WILD RIDE YET.  
> Thank you again for bearing with me and sticking with the story. I love you all. -3-


	11. Winter Storms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Only, something inside both of them altered that night when Kageyama died and Hinata spilled over his edges, and now they stand unbalanced where they once pulled at each other in perfect equilibrium.

The Hounds herd a puffy-eyed Hinata into their coffee shop just as the late afternoon light is turning golden. The sky is suddenly clear, as though after the thick fog and dark weather the heavens are taking a deep breath, so that they might exhale in gasps of harvest-warm light against the gathering clouds. The coffee shop is relatively empty but for a single barista wiping down the machines and counters, and Sugawara and Kageyama sitting side-by-side at a small table talking in lowered voices. The younger mage wears a hunted look on his face, which only worsens when he catches sight of the small group entering the coffee shop.

Hinata attempts to wave at Kageyama, but the other man is too busy staring at his clenched fists to notice.

‘Where’s Daichi gone?’ Nishinoya asks Sugawara.

The silver-haired mage looks paler than usual. He presses his lips into a thin line. ‘Daichi and Yamaguchi are out looking for Tsukishima,’ he tells the shortest of the Hounds. He glances at Kageyama sitting beside him, then his gaze settles on Hinata. He bends his head in the slightest of nods and stands from his seat, his jaw set in a determined line. ‘I think you two should have a talk,’ he tells the younger mage in a soft, smooth voice.

Sugawara grabs Tanaka by the arm and pulls him gently towards the back of the cafe, away from Kageyama and Hinata to a small gathering of soft armchairs where they can still keep an eye on the two. Asahi and Nishinoya follow Sugawara to the back of the shop even as they trade confused looks, because it’s just better to do what Sugawara wants than try and beg for forgiveness if they do fuck up. Sugawara already threatened to kill them once - and once is more than enough.

To say the reunion is an awkward affair is a wild understatement. Normally, Kageyama’s grumbling tones and Hinata’s excitable demeanor keep things rolling forwards in a comforting, off-key rhythm. They are two pieces who should never, never fit together, and yet somehow when set in motion Kageyama’s lightning-strike power and Hinata’s shapeshifting monstrosity collides and creates something both overwhelming and intensely accurate. It’s what makes them so terrifying to everyone around them. They strike as one. They move as one.

Only, something inside both of them altered that night when Kageyama died and Hinata spilled over his edges, and now they stand unbalanced where they once pulled at each other in perfect equilibrium. All the joy and life seems to have been scooped out of Hinata’s chest, and all that is left is the misplaced hunger and his wild, bloodshot eyes. Kageyama seems different too, both softer and sharper at the same time, like lightning forking behind a thick curtain of clouds, ready to strike yet never once touching the ground below.

‘Hi,’ Hinata says weakly, meeting the mage’s eye.

Anger crackles in the air around Kageyama’s silhouette. His eyes are mere slits in his face, blacker than black. He tries to reach for that firelight gentleness from last night, the strange something that he found in Sugawara’s eyes and on Sugawara’s skin, except he is so very far from that quiet apartment and its soft firelight. His vision is turning dark around the edges until he can see nothing but Hinata. Kageyama can smell a new burnt-flower stench rising off of the small-framed changeling, can see the oil-slick spread outwards from Hinata’s shadow eager to strike. It scares him. He wants to run as far away from it as possible, but he knows that Hinata would have never twisted out of shape if Kageyama hadn’t been attacked.

‘I can’t believe you were so stupid,’ Kageyama bites out. He doesn’t know how to form his worry into something soft and careful, the way Sugawara would. He doesn’t know how to tell someone he cares about them - nobody ever taught him. His words escape him like the cracking of a whip. ‘Why did you go after Oikawa?’

‘You were dead!’ Hinata cries out. There are hot, fat tears waiting to tumble down his reddening cheeks. ‘You were dead and I couldn’t stop it. I was _useless_.’

‘It’s none of your business!’ Kageyama snarls.

‘But it is,’ Hinata says, his voice too loud for such a small space.

Behind the counter, the barista on duty looks over at the two arguing young men nervously. It feels like a thunderstorm is about to break _inside_ the coffee shop instead of outside. It’s his second week on the job, and even if the manager warned him things got a little weird when the supernaturally beautiful patrons come in, he never thought it would be like this. They should hand out free protective gear when you get to the job.

Kageyama runs his hands over his face and through his hair. He can feel Hinata’s exhaustion radiating off the smaller fairy in waves. He knows it’s been a hard day for them both, but it never would have turned out this way if only he was smarter, stronger, more patient. _If he hadn’t gone down to the river, if he had been fast enough to sense Oikawa coming_ \- his head is spinning with all the mistakes he’s made, with all the mistakes he keeps on making. He’s no good to Hinata. He’s no good to anyone. It was all his fault.

‘I have to be stronger than this,’ he mutters to himself.

‘We’re stronger when we’re together!’ Hinata slams his fists onto the table so hard the standing menu falls over, shocking Kageyama into silence. Hinata’s cheeks are wet and shiny, and his chest heaves with the force of his emotions. ‘I’m your Pair.’

Kageyama frowns, yanking free from his stunned silence. ‘That’s not how it works-’

‘That _is_ how it works when it’s _us_ ,’ Hinata says fiercely.

Something inside Kageyama splinters beneath the weight of his guilt and shame, turning on Hinata with pointed teeth and feverish eyes like a frightened, cornered animal. He shoves the table away from him as he stands in one swift motion, sending it into Hinata’s chest and pinning the smaller man against his seat. Where his hands came in contact with the polished wood of the table, black bubbling rot begins to spread outwards like spilt coffee. He can feel his lightning-power sparking up out of him, threatening to destroy everything in its path. He can taste the static on his tongue and the amount of effort it takes to keep it all inside burns his throat.

‘We can’t go on like this,’ he snaps. ‘The next time someone comes for us, we’ll both die. Even I’m your Pair - even together we’re weak.’ _I’m weak_ , his mind whispers. ‘I couldn’t be there for you and you couldn’t keep it together without me. This is _fucked,_ ’ he grates out. ‘We’re no good for each other.’

Hinata climbs out of his seat, reaching out for his Pair with wide, frightened eyes.

The part of Kageyama that lived in the wild for years - the part of him that was exiled from his mother’s people and was desperate enough in its hunger to lure a little boy into the woods, the part that has brushed by death once too often, the part that is entirely his father’s and not at all his mother’s - lashes out instinctively with a loop of magic. Sharp lightning cracks through the distance between them. The barista dives behind the counter with a squeal, slamming his hands over his ears. A thin line of blood wells up on Hinata’s cheek where Kageyama’s magic hit him. Hinata touches his hand to the cut and stares, disbelieving, at the crimson smeared on his fingertips.

‘Kageyama!’ Tanaka shouts, his voice heavy and angry. ‘Stop this right now!’

Horror washes over him like icewater. Shaking his head, Kageyama turns around and flees from the coffee shop.

He can barely hear Sugawara calling after him. He can’t even see. There is bile on his tongue and static roaring in his ears, and far, far away he feels his father’s power pushing up and up and up out of him, and no dam can hold back the flash-flood as it thunders down towards him like the hooves of hundreds of bison charging over the hills.

\--

Shimizu sets down her near-empty down on the table and tucks her long, silky hair behind an ear. She smiles at the harried-looking barista as she stands. The barista flushes deeply and stares at her, jaw agape, but she knows he’ll get used to her eventually. Beauty is just beauty without a sirensong, and she doesn’t eat nice people who make excellent chai lattes.

Sugawara is ancient, and in his own slow and careful way, he is just as powerful as any of the Crows. Perhaps more so. But Sugawara never wears his power on his shoulders in a brash, self-absorbed way. He never wears his pain either - never lets anyone see the tragedies written in the tree-rings of his brown eyes. Everything that is neither sweet nor kind lies far, far beneath the silver-kissed surface of his oceans. Shimizu loves his kindness and his darkness equally, the same way she is fiercely loyal to Daichi and his fire-breath anger. She loves all her boys, her personal murder of Crows, their feathers too damp from the sea-spray to fly very high.

There are so many splinters piercing the hearts of her boys, and it hurts her to watch them flail and hiss and swipe at each other.

‘What do you need to fix this?’ she asks Sugawara, her hand pressing against his shoulder.

Sugawara’s cheeks turn petal-pink with his blushing. ‘Oh, Shimizu,’ he says, blinking at her. ‘I didn’t notice you there.’

‘What do you need to fix this?’ Shimizu asks again.

An inky darkness dances behind Sugawara’s eyes as the blush fades from his cheeks and his expression turns grim. ‘Something that I can’t have,’ he says. ‘Something locked away forever. But if I had it, if I could just sit down and _weave -_ maybe I could pull everyone back together again.’ He shakes his head roughly, as if to clear it. ‘But that’s impossible.’

The motion pulls him out of her grasp, but she chases his movement and grasps his arm tight in the curl of her hand. ‘What do you need to fix this?’ she asks for the third time, because elves and bloodlings aren’t the only ones who know the Old Ways.

Sugawara looks at her carefully, _looks into her_ , and a surprised smile bursts across his face like the sun from behind a cloud. For a moment, she feels as though the water is suddenly clear and she can see right down into the very bottom of Sugawara’s oceans, where there is life and lost treasure and a hundred wrecked ships full of bones of the boys and the girls they’ve both kissed.

‘A loom,’ he whispers to her. ‘A loom of the Queen of the Moon Garden.’

Shimizu nods. ‘Then you shall have your loom.’ She makes to leave for the closest large body of water - probably the river, because the river will eventually lead to the sea, where she can move faster than the gleaming white ships that skip on the surface - but then she slows, and turns to take another look at her friend’s face. ‘Sugawara,’ she says softly, gently, ‘if there’s anyone can fix a broken thing and turn it into a masterpiece, it’s you.’

The silver-haired fairy lifts his chin and meets her gaze. ‘What did we ever do without you?’ he asks with a small, sad smile.

Shimizu laughs, her mouth full of jagged teeth. ‘Dead in a ditch,’ she grins, her eyes turning milky white for a moment, ‘or drowned by a Sister.’

\--

Tsukishima does not know how he got here. He is Under the Hill, and the gates are open.

Tsukishima has never come to the place beneath the sycamore tree. He only joined the Crows after the gates were locked shut and the Unseelie had lost the great war.

Tsukishima looks up at the towering gates of shimmering crystals and glittering diamonds and bites his lip so hard it starts to bleed. There is dried blood on his mother’s sword. To carry the blade in through these gates is an open challenge to the Queen, but he can’t seem to ease his grip on the hilt. The circlet sits in his shirt, pressed against his heart - but he won’t use it. He can’t. The curse-burns sting savagely in harsh reminder.

_Akiteru’s head falls into the snow and rolls, over and over and over, to Tsukishima’s feet._

_The iron sizzles into Tsukishima’s flesh._

_Akiteru is dead. The mortal woman with a smile like honeydew and sunshine is gone._

_And he is an orphan, and everyone is dead, and where a boy and his brother danced together with sword and shield beside a lake lit by flicker-fairies, the ground is tainted with blood and shattered thorny armor._

He is wiser, isn’t he? He has been dutiful. He learned his lesson. But the marble catacomb is broken and he holds his mother’s silver-edged sword in his hand, and there is royal blood on his hands, and the gates of the Court Under the Hill are open and it is too late to turn back now.

The Court has been empty for so many years since the Queens fell out of love with each other’s cruelty and turned their claws and talons and fangs upon each other - so many years since the Unseelie lost to the Seelie. The Court Under the Hill aches for the wild revelries once whirling through its halls, and for laughing pixies and trolls and the flashing black cloaks of the Crows as they paraded through with their nightly kill. It is nothing like the Court of the Sun, nothing like the Moon Gardens. Everything that lies beneath the hill with the sycamore tree is made of shining crystal, glittering ice, curling black thorns, and many-petalled flowers that fill the halls with a heady perfume. The fruit down here grows in droplet-like shapes and glows with a spooky crimson light when all the torches are put out. If you dare let a single bite pass your lips, you will never again see the sun.

The throne room of the Winter Court sits upon an enormous frozen lake, under a domed ceiling dripping with hundreds, thousands of crystals. Seats like those of an amphitheater border the ice, made of smooth black marble veined with silver. The throne itself is woven out of thorns and adorned with bushels of blood-soaked black roses and crow-feathers.

And upon that throne that sat empty for so many long years, the Queen of the Winter Court reclines luxuriously, her long white legs stretched up on one of the armrests, her bare feet pointed artfully as she plays with something idly in her hands. Her hair falls about her face in crimson, lazy waves, held out of her face by a crown of black starmetal and crow-skulls. She is beautiful, the way all elves are beautiful - sharp and cruel and too-bright with mothwing-heavy lashes and strange, unearthly silver eyes. She isn’t dressed in armor, the way she was when Tsukishima saw her last. Instead, her long, lean body is swathed in a long, flowing midnight-colored dress that glitters like mica thrown into a spring.

She notices Tsukishima almost instantly, and a cold smile curls her rose-petal lips. She swings her legs down from where they were stretched and reveals the thing she was playing with - a long, thin shard of glass that glows like captured firelight, framed with curling gold-dipped starmetal.

‘Kei Tsukishima,’ the Winter Queen says, her voice soft and deep. ‘What a surprise.’ She sounds entirely unsurprised, of course.

Tsukishima’s feet make no noise on the ice as he crosses the throne room. He is too tired to pull his magic inside of him, so he leaks pools of molten gold in his wake from which moon-lilies blossom and then fold into hard opals.

When he finally speaks, his voice is surprisingly calm. ‘Why did you do it?’ he asks.

The Queen tilts her head. ‘Why?’ she pouts. ‘Because I was _bored_. Because old things suck, and it was time for new things.’ She tosses her empty hand dismissively.

‘Old things.’ He is shaking now, with anger and fear and exhaustion. ‘Like Old Kings and Old Queens?’

‘I don’t see why you’re being so sulky, Kei,’ the Unseelie Queen sighs.

She tosses the golden shard in her hand away. It skids across the ice and comes to rest at Tsukishima’s feet. It feels _wrong_ , somehow, like this little shard of metal and glass is vibrating out of sync with everything else, like to touch it would be to taint your magic and twist your insides out of shape. He steps carefully around it. He already knows what it is, and where it came from - that abandoned throne sitting in a quiet hall beneath the carousel.

‘You never cared about legacy and order anyways,’ the Queen says. ‘You don’t care about anything. That’s why I like you so much. You’re so heartless you swore fealty to _me_. And I was the one who killed all your people.’ Her smile is a wet knife-slash in her face, her lips too red, her teeth too white. ‘I murdered your brother,’ she sings. ‘I murdered your father. I murdered your mother. I murdered your dancers and your knights and everyone you ever loved. And still, you crawled into my court and pledged fealty to me.’

‘I didn’t have a choice,’ he retorts grimly. _I never had a choice_.

She makes a disgusted little sound at the back of her throat and rolls her eyes. ‘So _now_ you care.’ Her gaze catches on the silver-edged sword in his hand. ‘I thought I destroyed that thing,’ she remarks. Her voice is sweet but laced with poison. ‘You dare bring that relic into my Court?’

Tsukishima grips his sword tighter. ‘You broke the Order.’

She smiles with a mouth full of fangs. ‘Yes, little boy,’ she hisses. ‘ _I_ broke the Order. And now I’m going to break you.’

The air screams in her wake as she flings herself impossibly fast across the frozen lake - one minute she is lounging on her throne, the next, she is sweeping her leg in a vicious kick to Tsukishima’s side. Her blow sends him flying into the air. The ice splinters where he lands with a resonating crack so loud the crystals in the ceiling shake.

‘You treasonous little shit,’ the Queen of the Winter Court growls. She stalks towards him, brandishing her long, pointed nails. She could kill him easily. She was always the strongest of the two Queens, the most bloodthirsty. She enjoyed the slaughter of his mother’s people far more than her wife had.  

He tries to breath but his chest is on fire with torturous agony. His ribs are broken. One of them is probably stuck in his lung, but it won’t kill him the way it does humans. Only beheading can kill one of his kind. The sword in his hand is a knife once more, and he clutches it to his chest instinctively. She cannot take this away too. He will bury it in his heart if he must, and he will finally join his lost family. He will die here with his crown and his knife, his father and his mother, and be home at last.

He shouldn’t be afraid to die. He has been dead for centuries.

_Except then his mind flashes to gentle hands, and lips that hide hooked teeth, and he is terrified that he won’t get to taste cool rock and underground springs ever again._

‘Oh, sweet little child,’ the Queen purrs, ‘do you honestly think I would be merciful?’ She bends over him, pressing her fingers so tightly around his throat it will leave a dark purpling of bruises if he does survive this. She traces a claw lightly across his bared throat. ‘If I killed you now, you would finally be at peace. You don’t deserve peace. Live, Kei, live in your suffering and your loneliness and your rage and your desire for revenge.’

‘You evil bitch,’ Tsukishima forces through his gritted teeth.

Her laugh is silvery and mocking. She straightens, her feathered coat swirling around her as her magic grows, shadows looming threateningly over Tsukishima as he lies, broken. ‘Kei Tsukishima,’ she intones, invoking his True Name, ‘you are banished from my Court until the day your pathetic life ends. No longer shall you ride with the Hunt, no longer shall you walk these halls, no longer shall you seek protection from my crown.’

The night wind yanks him up into the air. With a thundering roar, the Queen swipes at him with the clawed points of the spell. The force of the Banishment picks him up with all the force of the night wind and flings him backwards, through throne room and feasting hall and hundreds of corridors until he is tossed into the mortal realm. He lands with a moan in the middle of the graveyard, on top of a tombstone eroded by time and neglect. The carved stone breaks upon impact. Tsukishima rolls away from the broken tombstone and into an inch of fresh snow and dirt and shredded grass.

As Tsukishima lies shivering in the snow among the dead, blind with pain, the half-moon mark of the Banishment draws itself inky-black onto the soft skin inside his wrist, matching the other silvery scars beneath his sleeve. The broken moon is temporarily shrouded by the heavy clouds, and the world is suspended in a bloody gloom.

Tsukishima summons the last of his strength and searches his fragmented memories for the old, old song his mother used to sing him from her loom, the song that would bring him back to her no matter how far he wandered. His eyes sting with the memory of her beautiful, serene face looking down at him as her the shuttle whispered back, forth, back, forth, and she wove the seasons into being.

_Come away, little child, come away from the forest. I have made a bed of flowers for your slumber._

The tapestry of her spell hangs above him, and he can almost feel her gentle lips on his blood-spattered brow. He thinks of her beautiful gardens and the skeletons that inhabit their ruins. His eyes are full of tears and he must have a heart, after all, because it is a mauled thing inside his chest, and he is exhausted and there is no home to go to.

But the spell is complete, and the final knot of the tapestry ties itself, eager to be finished. His mother’s song whispers to him patiently, _pull, pull, come, come_. He reaches out with shaking hands.

‘Carry me,’ he tells it, and it obeys.

\--

Midnight strikes just as the clouds roll away from the broken red moon in the night sky. The heavy snowfall lessens, and the strange cotton-soft silence falls away as the air turns crisp. The temperature plummets swiftly, and any stragglers out in the cold hurry indoors to warm fireplaces and golden twinkling lights.

Kenma stands alone on the bridge over the lake in the park, scarf knotted tightly around his neck to ward off the icy bite of the wind. He watches the reflection of the moon in the water - _broken pieces of a ruby_ , he thinks to himself - and counts the minutes of the new day.

When they told her that the Spring Court’s mage had murdered a Crow, she only smiled a strange, secret smile.

When they told her a Shield Crow murdered the Spring King’s son, she laughed in a glissando of delicate silverbells.

When Kuroo, confused and irritated and exhausted, tried to tell her something about the Order, she silenced him with a wave of her hand. _Forget the Order_ , she declared, rising from her throne. _Tonight we feast for our trooping fairies._

Kenma was given a crown of white flowers and invited to sit at his Queen’s side. The Seelie Queen’s sapphire eyes gleamed with a terrible knowing as she watched Kuroo drink and joke and pick fights with the youngest trooping fairies. In all the years he has marched with the trooping fairies, this is the first time the Seelie Queen makes him feel so unsettled. There is a _wrongness_ hanging between the everblooming trees and the tall pines of the Seelie Court, seeping into the mossy ground and making a home in the earth. He can still taste its imprint on his tongue, syrupy sweet like treacle to cover the bitter aftertaste.

Kuroo plays his part well. He flirts and he teases and with mead brimming from his cup he has so much magic in his veins that his glamor intensifies, softens his features and makes him so handsome it hurts to look directly at him. He plies his Queen with showers of diamonds and gold and compliments. Everyone wants to be around Kuroo and bask in his charm. But Kenma isn’t like that.

Especially not tonight. Tonight, he needed to get away from everyone else, away from the feasting and the drinking and the dancing and frolicking, before the quiet ache inside his chest turned into a shuddering anguish. Maybe it would have been easier to remain if only someone, _anyone_ , had taken the fuckery seriously. The moon is broken, there is an off-pitch howling upon the wind, and _last night_ _Hinata sat in the tall grass and drowned in his own tears._

Kenma rubs his hands over his eyes, pushes them through his two-tone hair, and breathes deep. He counts the minutes of the new day.

A wind comes sweeping through the bare branches of the acorn trees and dips low over the surface of the water, dragging ripples in its wake. At the wind’s tail comes the Crow with hair like trees aflame with Fall, his eyes bright like coals in the darkness.

Hinata comes to a stop at the edge of the bridge as the wind tugs at his flame-colored hair, and Kenma isn’t sure if the Crow came of his own accord, or if this was the lingering force of his wish made those years ago, using magic of the Court of Red Leaves.

‘Why are you here?’ Kenma asks him softly. He wants to look away, because he always looks away, but Hinata glows with a light all of his own and no broken bloodmoon can draw Kenma’s attention away now. So he looks upon the source of his joy, of his pain, and laments ever wanting to look away.

Hinata takes a few steps towards Kenma. He is so achingly beautiful in the night - how could Kenma have ever imagined Hinata belonged to anyone but the dark?

‘I wanted to see you,’ Hinata answers in the blunt, honest way he says everything. ‘So I followed your scent.’ He tilts his head slightly, and the moon drips its ruby fingers into his eyes and colors them fire-bright. He looks otherworldly - like he belongs somewhere beyond the four Courts and even the Courts that have long since been forgotten. ‘You smell like apples and wind-magic,’ Hinata tells him.

Kenma wonders vaguely if Hinata knows how much his words can hurt, like knives twisting sweetly between his ribs. He tucks his hands into his jacket pockets so that Hinata won’t see them shake. He remembers the Shield-Crow’s haunting words, far beneath the painted horses of the carousel, and he knows it deep in his bones: Hinata will be the fucking death of him. In the fall he fell in love with the boy with golden leaves in his autumnal hair, who smiled and laughed and talked too loudly and wore his heart on his sleeve. And now he is slipping, tumbling, _plummeting_ down towards his love for the beast with the oil-slick skin who splintered the moon with the force of his mourning.

‘Kenma,’ Hinata frowns, stepping close. ‘Why are you sad?’

 _He is so close Kenma can feel the warmth rising from his body, so close that if he bends his head, just a little, his lips could brush against Hinata’s neck. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that he_ **_can_ ** _do that, bend his head, taste the night dew as it forms on Hinata’s skin, pull himself inside-out and finally, finally, finally find out what those deadly lips taste like. Perhaps the tragedy is that he can, but he never will._

‘Does it matter?’ Kenma says out loud.

Hinata’s face wrinkles with his confusion and concern. ‘Of course it does,’ he says firmly. ‘You’re my friend. And,’ he adds, his voice strong and his expression determined, ‘I don’t want to kill you. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to fight you.’

_Fuck, he’s too tired for this. His lungs feel sandpaper-raw from all the drowning he’s done in all his golden-leaf desires._

‘What do you want?’ Kenma asks, fully intending to sound as firm, as strong, as determined - but it comes out no more than a whisper. He feels like his chest has been cut open, his ribs pried apart, and now his heart hammers as it sits exposed to the chilly night air.

Hinata pulls his chin firmly towards his chest. ‘I want to feed ducks on Sundays. I want to walk together under the leaves when they change next year. I want to be better,’ he adds, his voice wobbling slightly as his eyes glimmer with unshed tears, ‘and stronger - but not so I can fight you. Not so I can fight _anyone._ ’

Hope hammers an unforgiving beat in Kenma’s throat, putting a stopper on whatever words were threatening to spill in these early minutes of the day. He watches Hinata’s face and waits for the next words to strike their blow.

‘I want to be stronger, better, so I can protect the ones I love,’ Hinata says fiercely. His tears fall from his face - _is he always crying, this beautiful boy, this oil-slick monster? -_ and his hands shake despite being clenched into tight little fists. ‘So I can protect Kageyama. So I can protect _you_.’ He shakes his head so hard Kenma distantly wonders if he’ll give himself whiplash. ‘I can’t live without you.’

A strangled half-sob, half-laugh bursts out of Kenma before he can stop it. He knows this isn’t what he desperately wants it to be - he knows that Hinata doesn’t mean what his words are implying. He knows Hinata doesn’t love him back. _Hinata will never love him back._

‘I can’t live without you either,’ Kenma says, because even he is made of all the hundred million things he does not do and the hundred million things he will never say, Hinata is taking that last step towards him and pulling him into a tight embrace -

And for some reason, this time, Hinata’s magic doesn’t feel angry, hungry, reckless. This time, his magic feels like night-blooming flowers, like springwater running over cold stones, like opals glistening beneath silver moonlight.

\--

The first night of the Hunt is always the most difficult, and it seems this year more so than the years before. Yamaguchi got attacked by a random pixie and lost. Kageyama nearly died. Hinata shapeshifted into a monster and is now suffering from some kind of trauma. Tsukishima went missing after he went after Hinata, and nobody knows where he is, and now Yamaguchi is off stomping the wilderness after his friend. And the _icing on the fucking cake_ is that, sooner of later, the Unseelie Queen is going to drag him by the ear before the Court and have him answer for starting a new war with the Spring Fairies.

Daichi lets loose a guttural, animalistic growl of frustration at the sidewalk, sending a couple scuttling a good foot away from him in alarm.

But, like, is he even _surprised_ anymore?Without the new Crows, he still has to deal with the Hounds - or, rather, the supreme idiot club sandwich. Asahi is an overgrown child and a walking disaster who cries when it gets too dark or when he sees blood. Tanaka seems to have forgotten that a normal person would keep their fucking shirt on in cold weather. Nishinoya would probably hump a fire hydrant if no one kept an eye on him.

Daichi stares up at the night sky, clouds rolling swiftly over the shattered bloodmoon, and considers having a bit of a cry. Like, a very manly rage-cry.

 _Thank the Queen for Suga_. Without his mage Pair and right-hand-Crow, Daichi would have lost his fucking mind already. But Suga is up there in their warm apartment, and he is down here, fiddling with his keys and his shoes filling up with slush.

Maybe Daichi will have that very manly cry after all.

After long hours of snowfall which is threatening to become a blizzard, the snow is finally sticking and the sidewalk piles up ankle-deep with soft, fluffy snow. Daichi’s hands are nearly frozen as he fumbles with the keys to his apartment, wincing as his bare skin brushes over metal. He grumbles to himself as he tries to unlock the front gate to his apartment building. Even through the layers of black paint, he can feel the iron stabbing at his fingers. Every- _fucking_ -thing has iron in it, and it hems in his vision with crimson so that he has barely any periphery left. He was born Under the Hill, before the gates were closed, surrounded by the magic that lived deep in the soil and roared up at every revelry, soaking his skin and drowning his bones with delirium. To stand Under the Hill is to stand in true darkness, but some nights the dark felt more alive than any sunlit glen ever could, because there was so much _living_ to be done in the dark.

When the Crows returned from the Hunt each night, there would be an enormous feast held in their honor. All those black-uniformed knights and hunters, sitting at the Queen’s long table with red flowers braided into their hair and their cups overflowing with mead and blood as the Hounds lay beneath the table chewing on bone and marrow. Daichi remembers dancing beneath a full eclipse, pressing his hands against his best friend’s waist as she twirled and twirled and ice spread beneath her bare toes like stars bursting on a night sky, and together they laughed as they ran through the woods in the false night, turning spring to winter just for a day. In the deepest parts of the night, they would sit up in the highest branches of ancient trees and watch firefly-fairies follow the parade of Crows in a shimmering river of twinkling golden lights, hundreds upon hundreds of eager tiny mouths waiting to lap up any spilt blood.

It isn’t really like that anymore. Now there is just darkness, the Hunt, and being hunted.

Suddenly, a shrieking, whistling sound drags through the haze. A powerful wind knocks into Daichi. He grapples at his coat, attempting to keep warm and retain his hold on his keys at the same time, and in his efforts, turns to face the direction of the howling wind. Standing crooked beneath a flickering lamp, eyes glowing like some kind of phantom as the awful wind picks up and whips into a tiny tornado around him, is Tsukishima.

‘Shit-fuck!’ Daichi yelps, dropping the keys in the snow.

The Shield Crow’s lip is bleeding and his eyes are bloodshot, and as he starts toward Daichi his left leg drags behind him through the snow. The wind is gone as quickly as it came.

‘Tsukishima!’ Daichi calls out, any irritation cancelled by worry. ‘Are you okay? What the hell happened to you?’

Tsukishima all but collapses against the iron fence, barely reacting to its sting - if he even felt it - and coughs something dark and viscous onto his own shirt. He wheezes heavily, his lips moving as though trying to form words, but Daichi can’t quite catch it. Daichi leans closer, gingerly avoiding the gate as much as he can. Tsukishima’s collar peels away from his neck, revealing purpling bruises and rough scratches. The blond fairy draws a gurgling, rattling breath.

‘The Court,’ he croaks, grappling at the lapels of Daichi’s jacket. ‘The gates to the Unseelie Court are open.’

Then Tsukishima crumples like a puppet with all its strings cut.

Shocked, Daichi barely has time to catch him. ‘What the- _Sugawara_!’ he screams. ‘Sugawara, help!’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are so many moving parts! Wow what a mess! So much angst! Everything is terrible!  
> The next chapter might take a while to write, I'm still deciding on how best to write this chaotic timeline. But it'll be glorious, I promise.


	12. Thieves and Rebels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘Honestly, Tsukki,’ Kuroo grins, throwing Tsukishima a playful look, ‘isn’t it obvious by now what my intentions with you are?’  
> No, not really, Tsukishima thinks, because you’re handsome and filthy hot and you look at me like I’m some kind of precious, delicate thing, but I’m not, and this can’t be real, even if you’ve given me promise after promise after promise and you taste like cool rock and underground springs.

Kuroo sees Tsukishima before the tall blond catches sight of him. He is leaning blearily against the coffee machine and stares vaguely into some far-off distance as he waits for the human-made contraption to foam the milk. Behind him, Bokuto is furiously pumping a wild combination of flavored syrups into a tall glass of over-milky coffee while an angry-looking teenage girl stands waiting with her arms folded over her chest. There are faint scratches healing on Tsukishima’s face and neck, and a dinosaur-shaped band-aid on his forehead that Bokuto probably produced out of his ass.

‘Rough night?’ Kuroo asks teasingly as he approaches the counter of the cafe.

Tsukishima transitions from staring blearily into the distance to blinking slowly at the Seelie fairy. ‘Um,’ he says eloquently.

Tsukishima looks even more tired up close. Shit, he looks _exhausted_ , like he is one breath away from collapsing right here on the floor and never rising again. His hands are scratched up too, and his pinky has been tied up to his ring-finger in a makeshift splint. Whoever they have on hand as a healer at the Unseelie Court is a complete idiot, because there is no way that Kuroo would have ever, _ever_ allowed his precious Tsukki to be injured this badly.

Tsukishima turns off the steam and hands the tall steel pitcher of hot milk to Bokuto, who takes care to wrap his hand in a thick towel before gingerly handling the pitcher. Most Fair Folk dislike handling metals of any kind, but it seems that the blond fairy is entirely impervious to the often-painful effects of touching metal.

‘Thanks,’ Bokuto says brightly. He looks Tsukishima up and down, then glances over at Kuroo, and throws Kuroo a small, sympathetic smile. ‘Hey, Tsukki, maybe you should take a break? Or, maybe take the whole day off? You look like crap.’

‘Um,’ repeats Tsukishima, uncharacteristically monosyllabic today. He pauses for a moment, as if uncertain what he needs to do next, then pulls off his apron. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Bokuto waves at Kuroo as he and Tsukki wander off together. They belong to entirely different Courts, but there is something to be said about being lowly not-so-fair folk, goblins and shapeshifters and owl-fairies and horned, taloned things. A camaraderie. They do not belong and yet they make themselves belong, or better yet, they take over the fucking show and make it theirs.

Tsukishima’s feet start towards the exhibits, so Kuroo follows wordlessly.

‘Do you remember what the Old Mother said?’ Tsukki says quietly. His hands shake as he presses them against his ribs and winces, although they can’t be broken, _can they?_ ‘Because I can hear it, over and over and _over_ again in my fucking head and it won’t stop. I’m so tired and I have to fix it, I have to fix everything. _Every fucking thing that that bitch broke,_ it’s on me to fix.’

He breaks off, blinking wildly and his eyes are wild and damp and Kuroo wants to pull back the hands on the clock to when they stood pressed chest-to-chest in front of the oak tree - where nothing was complicated, nothing existed, nothing but their lips and hands and Tsukki’s fingers tangled up in his hair, against his horns.

‘I do recall what the Old Mother said,’ Kuroo says in a voice that is suddenly too loud, echoing in the quiet hall and all its staring pictures of long-dead humans. ‘Word for cursed word.’ He recites them, then, because he remembers this shit only because it frightened him, because he knows _exactly_ what the old fairy’s words had meant.

‘ _The Winter Queen broke the Ancient Order._  
_The Winter Queen from the Unnamed Court climbed beneath the earth and broke the throne of the King of the Court of the Sun, where the Old Ways were made._  
 _Heal the Ancient Order, little golden prince, by eating the Winter Queen’s black heart, and sitting upon the throne that is yours._ ’

Tsukki laughs a horrible, wet laugh that explodes from his throat. ‘Yeah,’ he grits out between his too-sharp teeth. ‘The throne that is mine. That _was_ mine. That was my br-’ he shakes his head and slams his jaw shut.

Kuroo watches, trapped in his own silence.

‘I don’t know, I just don’t know,’ Tsukishima sighs. ‘I don’t know if I can fight this one on my own, Kuroo. I don’t know if I want to.’ His eyes are open and vulnerable, and hell if it doesn’t burn in Kuroo’s throat like a million fires. ‘My family wrote the rulebook to following the Old Ways. When things went wrong, we were responsible for setting it right again. But my family is dead and nobody is left with the Old Blood, and I’m… I just can’t do this.’

The Shield Crow has brought them around to the taxidermy birds. He stares at them and the shadows beneath his eyes deepen. Yellow glass eyes stare back at him from the tall display cases.

‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ Tsukishima says hollowly, staring at the polished glass of the display case in front of him. ‘I don’t know why you would care. Reconnaissance, right? That’s all this is.’ He pushes his fingertips against his temples so that his hand covers the most of his face. ‘You’re just using me. And that’s fine. That. That’s fine.’ He pulls the buttoned sleeve of his shirt away from his wrist, revealing a black half-moon printed onto his skin. ‘You don’t have to come here anymore. There’s no reconnaissance to be done here - I was kicked out of Court. I’m useless to you now.’

It stings like a whiplash across the goblin’s throat. But how could an elf know what it means to give away your scale? Elves and goblins don’t usually cross paths this way, the way Tsukishima and Kuroo have.

‘If that is what you think this is,’ Kuroo says softly, ‘then I guess it can’t be helped.’

The blond fairy glances at him sharply, his eyes widening slightly behind the rectangular frame of his glasses. He presses his lips together for a moment, then parts them as if to speak only to abandon the words before he can say a single one. A small, crooked smile forms on the corner of his lips.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Tsukishima. He pushes his hands into fists, fighting against something. Kuroo looks at him, lost and tired and defensive, and wishes he understood what it was that Tsukishima was struggling with. ‘What are you here for?’

Kuroo shakes his head. ‘To see if you’re okay,’ he answers honestly. He wants to take Tsukishima’s face into his hands, to run his thumbs over those dark circles under the blond fairy’s eyes and heal them away.

Tsukishima’s smile is cracks over his face like the splintering of ice over a frozen lake. He reaches out and brushes his fingertips over Kuroo’s cheekbones, his jaw, then drops away, leaving Kuroo feeling cold and hollow for the absence of touch. ‘Do not give me the boon of your kindness,’ he says.

Kuroo frowns in confusion. How can kindness mean anything more than just that: kindness, freely and truly given?

There it is again, that awful, broken smile that speaks of abandoned things once beautiful, now faded and left to collect dust in attic corners. ‘Your kindness is a promise,’ the blond fairy says cryptically, ‘and I shall not have any more promises from you.’

‘Then how about payment of our agreement?’ Kuroo responds. ‘I know I said Friday, but let’s go now. Let’s have that redo of our date.’ He smiles, flashing what he knows to be his most charming grin.

Tsukishima laughs. ‘I did say I would go with you,’ he admits. He tilts his head away from Kuroo, unconsciously exposing the long pale stretch of his neck, and Kuroo wants to know if the skin there will taste like sunlight, the way his lips had. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Somewhere where there are no Courts and no rules,’ Kuroo says mysteriously. ‘And no humans, too.’

Tsukishima arches his eyebrows skeptically. ‘There is no such place.’

‘I’d say I’d hate proving you wrong,’ the goblin grins wickedly, ‘but then, I’d be lying.’

\--

Yachi wanders through the fog blanketing the pier, dressed in blush-pink with tiny clips in her short blonde hair, and her white socks have lace trimmings. Her small stature and delicate limbs make her look as though she would blow over in a stiff breeze. Today she smells like strawberries and cream. She is honey to the fly circling behind her, and as she wanders further away from the busy part of the pier, she allows herself a wicked, curling smile. A man in a dark blue parka follows her, staring over the edge of the pier into the briny waves in an obvious show of false nonchalance.

Sirens are patient. They count wishes carelessly flung into ponds and waterfalls, collecting secret desires and wistful dreams. Every victim is different, and so each of them has their own sweet death-song - haunting, piercing, echoing above foggy cliffs. She’s been hunting this mortal for three months. She’s watched him stalk little girls at carnivals, his eyes tracking their movements with a hunger that disgusts even a beast like her.

Five continents she has hunted on, and five continents have fed her generously. This one is no different - and here, the land sings with magic. Her sirensong is stronger for it. It is why some sisters pledge themselves to the landlocked Courts, happy to swim in smaller pools if only to satisfy a larger appetite. The feeling of belonging is alluring, so alluring that nearly none of Yachi’s kind remain in the poisoned, overfished oceans.

Alluring, yes, but Yachi has never really thought about the Fair Folk that walk upon dry land. She does perfectly fine on her own.

The carnival is lost behind them in the swirling fog, and out here the heavy silence is cut only by the crashing of the waves and the screeching of gulls perched on dipping buoys. The man in the blue parka draws closer, ready to strike now that they are alone. Yachi purposefully steps to the side and steps up to the pier’s edge, a gust of wind catching her skirt as she looks down into the water to judge its depth. They have long since left the beach’s sandbanks and bars behind, and now the water is at least twenty feet deep and the tide is high. She listens as the man’s footsteps stop just behind her.

It is time.

She turns slowly, letting her glamor fall away slowly. It starts with her eyes, white and milky and blind, and then spreads to her features, where her mouth stretches into a horrifying, too-wide grin. Her fingers become webbed and pointed with tiny little cat’s talons.

‘What are you?’ utters the mortal in horror, predator turned to prey.

Her voice is sweet like rose-scented syrup, and her many teeth are jagged in her mouth. ‘I am where you end,’ she trills.

Before he has time to draw breath to scream, she grabs him by his neck and pulls him over the railing. She drags him beneath the waves, girlish body slipping away like a snake’s skin. She admires her reflection in his pupils as her form morphs into something covered in so many crimson and gold scales, and her mouth yawns open with all its jagged teeth and rips his tongue from his mouth.

And then she feasts.

Hours later, she surfaces from the water beneath the pier and wraps a fresh coat of glamor around her. As she wanders up the shore, belly full of her kill, she counts the many, many trees that line the beach. Behind her, the sounds of laughter and music begin to fade again in the fog. Her bare feet leave no mark upon the wet sand. She hums to herself a song she heard a handsome man sing on the well-scrubbed decks of a pirate ship a long, long time ago, before all the rebels and thieves were strung up and hunted, before the world grew small and busy with mortals. She tries to recall the words of the old song, but they are long since lost to the sea-mists of her memory.

She swaps instead to a song she used to sing with her sisters in the deep, before they banished her for stealing too many treasures from the Sea King’s palace - but could they blame her? The oceans and the deep, endless lakes belong to the Sisters, not to any one merman with his self-proclaimed titles. Yachi couldn’t bring herself to respect him enough to suppress her bad habits.

As she starts up the haunting chorus of the song, another voice layers in sweetly with hers. Yachi turns to face the source of the second singer, her heart hammering in her throat.

Standing up on the higher dunes of the beach, dressed in a black sweater embroidered with red roses and tight leather jeans, stands a beautiful woman with jet-black hair and milk-white eyes. The strange woman lifts a cigarette to her cherry-red lips, cutting off her singing. The end glows orange as she inhales.

‘Hitoka Yachi,’ calls the strange woman, blowing out curling cigarette-smoke.

Yachi has not seen another Sister in decades, let alone one as ancient and powerful as this. She can smell the freshwater from here, and it frightens her somewhat, being a saltwater creature tossed about by her own mercurial temper. Freshwater Sisters are always quiet in a way that saltwater Sisters aren’t, and it makes them dangerously unpredictable.

Yachi gathers her foam-blue dress around her and steps away from the lapping waves at the beach. Her steps are careful as she climbs the dune towards the Sister. ‘I never thought someone like you would ever talk to me,’ she confesses, looking up at the beautiful woman and her strange, white eyes. ‘I’m kind of below your caliber.’

‘Oh, don’t sell yourself short,’ the older siren tells her with a warm smile. ‘Look at all the good work you have done.’ Her smile turns sly and knowing. ‘But I also know about your other hobby.’

Yachi tries not to look to guilty, but she’s been caught with her hand in the cookie jar and she really doesn’t know whether to lie outright or run. ‘Um,’ she says instead.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ the siren laughs, waving her hand. ‘I don’t care how many tridents or cursed chests you’ve stolen.’

‘You’re in the minority,’ Yachi grumbles. She pushes her hair out of her face self-consciously. ‘What did you come to see me for? I have no loyalties to any Court, and nobody really associates with me anymore since I got kicked out. I’m not exactly powerful either,’ she adds, because being clever is not the same as being powerful, and sometimes people don’t give two shits about how clever you are.

The siren smiles and takes another puff of her cigarette. She extends a hand to Yachi. Her nails are long and painted a matte black. ‘Kiyoko Shimizu,’ she says. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

Yachi shakes her hand. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I need you to steal something for me,’ Shimizu says, half a request and half a command.

_Oh._ That she can do. ‘What do you need?’ Yachi asks eagerly. ‘Where from?’

‘I need you to retrieve a loom from the Seelie Queen’s treasuries,’ Shimizu says. She takes another puff of her cigarette and blows a long column of smoke up into the air. ‘It doesn’t belong to her anyways.’

Yachi shrugs. ‘Ownership is transitory,’ she says.

‘She will have it heavily guarded.’

‘Heavily guarded against the Fair Folk,’ Yachi corrects, excitement bubbling up in her veins like seafoam. ‘I’ll do it.’

Her fingers itch in anticipation. She’s never stolen from a land-locked Queen before - it seems almost low-risk compared to wrestling a trident from a very angry, very powerful merman. And she’s done the latter more times than she can count.

Besides, a siren has only one loyalty from birth, and that is to her sisters.

\--

Kuroo drives towards the ruins of the city, and for a moment, Tsukishima allows himself to look upon the object of his desire. The Seelie fairy’s eyes are fastened upon the road, one hand gently guiding the steering wheel of the human contraption while his other hand settles lightly on the gears. Without the high collar of Kuroo’s jacket hiding part of his jawline and neck, Tsukishima can watch the way the tendons in his neck move, can admire the broad sweep of his shoulders, and the muscular shape of his arms beneath the tight fabric of his t-shirt. Tsukishima’s head swims - he hasn’t slept, he hasn’t eaten, and the patchwork healing Sugawara performed on him last night is barely holding him together - and he vaguely wonders what the Seelie fairy would look like _without_ the shirt too.

‘See something you like?’ Kuroo says, his voice a low rumble in his chest, and Tsukishima swears he’s doing it on purpose.

They do not turn off into the dusty road that leads to the riverside. Instead, they go up onto the bridge and drive out of the city entirely.

Tsukishima sits up straight in a mild panic. ‘Where are we going?’ he demands. He has never once, not once in his entire lifetime, left the borders of the city and the mounds of the Courts he grew up in.

‘Away from this mess,’ is all that Kuroo will say. His eyes are strange, full of something that seems familiar to Tsukishima, and yet he cannot find a name for everything that brims over those dark eyes.

As Kuroo guides the steering wheel with a light touch of his fingertips, he reaches over Tsukishima with liquid-smooth nonchalance, brushing close enough to the blond fairy that he can see the nape of Kuroo’s neck. He retrieves a brown leather-wrapped flask from the glovebox and snaps the compartment closed with a flick of his wrist. Too soon he is moving out of reach and back to his seat. Tsukishima can still feel Kuroo’s warmth radiating off him, and it builds a murmuration of starlings in his chest.

‘Goblin wine,’ Kuroo says. His smile is slow and luxurious as he sips from the flask. He holds it out for Tsukishima to take.

Tsukishima plucks the flask from Kuroo’s fingers and sniffs at its contents gingerly. In his hands, the goblin wine hums with low, haunting melodies, taunting Tsukishima to take just one taste, one more sip, one little dash of tongue against the corner of a mouth full of hooked teeth-

Tsukishima blinks, feeling the heat rush to his cheeks and to the tips of his pointed ears. He glares at the flask and tries to recall if he ever read anything about goblin wine being an aphrodisiac or a love potion.

‘It’s not poison,’ laughs Kuroo. His lips are wet from his drink and his eyes glimmer like candlelight. Everything about him is loose, careless, wild and delightful like the rush of wind howling through the tall chimneys of an endless cavern. This close, Tsukishima can smell the pungent earth on his skin mingling with his cologne - _human cologne_ \- and the petrichor sting of his magic twisting around his hidden horns. It is heady, he is dizzy, he is lost.

He drinks the goblin wine and feels it settle thick and sweet on his tongue, more intoxicating than the elf-mead he once drank in his father’s halls, and not quite as fiery as some of the alcohol that his fellow Crows favor. It unfurls in his throat and strokes through his veins, whispering, whispering, whispering about deep tunnels and roaring fireplaces and endless dances where the partners whirl and whirl and create a magic entirely of their own that does not obey the same rules of the Courts within the city. He takes another sip, closing his eyes in temporary bliss. He hasn’t tasted anything but iron-sharp blood since the Hunt called for him with its howl-song, but the Hunt has no claim on him anymore, and the Queen and her curse can no longer reach him. Nothing can reach him except for Kuroo’s voice and the taste of revelry far beneath the earth.

‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ Kuroo laughs. His voice echoes through Tsukishima’s ears and traces teasing patterns down over his chest. ‘It’s pure magic, that.’

Tsukishima cracks open an eye. ‘Magic?’ he asks softly.

‘Yeah, well,’ Kuroo shrugs, his smile twisting wryly, ‘I wasn’t brought up to use my magic as a weapon.’

Tsukishima feels the agonizing burn on his forearms, and the awful creaking of still-repairing ribs. ‘I wasn’t either,’ he says tightly.

‘I know,’ the goblin says steadily. _I know what you are._ ‘So drink up. We’re going dancing.’

Tsukishima raises his eyebrows in surprise. ‘What, at a human club?’ he asks. He never goes dancing. He knows that the other Crows absolutely adore it, but he avoids it as best as he can, sticking instead to quiet establishments where they play sports on the television and he can enjoy a good glass of whiskey.

Kuroo shakes his head, laughter dancing in his eyes. ‘Oh, of course not,’ he grins. ‘I’m taking you to the halls of the Goblin King.’

Tsukishima frowns. ‘This is hardly the time for-’

‘Shut up,’ Kuroo cuts him off, his voice soft and fond despite his words. ‘Stop worrying for once. Like I said, no Courts, no rules.’

Around them, the huddled buildings drop away from the highway and suddenly they are surrounded by tall bare-branched trees, interrupted only by a rush of dark evergreen trees. In the distance, mountains loom up against the crisp blue sky. Tsukishima has never been this far from his home, never went beyond the bridge. He can feel the grip of the Courts loosen on him as Kuroo’s car hurtles down the highway, taking them further and further away from the city. Even the curse-burns hurt less, somehow. The Seelie fairy pulls off the highway onto a narrow, winding road that weaves through a flurry of pine trees. A tall mountain moves in and out of view in the distance, clearly their destination.

Tsukishima takes another swig of the goblin-wine. It dances down his throat and builds a bonfire in his chest, where it starts to spread through his veins and fills his head with silly, hopeless ideas about goblins and how they might taste. His ribs don’t even hurt anymore - although that might just be the magic of the wine at work.

‘Why are you still bothering with me,’ he says out loud, ‘if I’m not Unseelie anymore?’

Kuroo laughs, shaking his head. He pulls off the narrow road onto a one-lane dirt path. For a few minutes, the car bumps up and down on the uneven surface, but then the goblin waves his hand and the path miraculously evens out beneath the car’s wheels. ‘Honestly, Tsukki,’ Kuroo grins, throwing Tsukishima a playful look, ‘isn’t it obvious by now what my intentions with you are?’

_No, not really,_ Tsukishima thinks, _because you’re handsome and filthy hot and you look at me like I’m some kind of precious, delicate thing, but I’m not, and this can’t be real, even if you’ve given me promise after promise after promise and you taste like cool rock and underground springs._

‘I don’t know,’ he manages to say in a strangled voice.

Kuroo parks the car on a small bank beside the dirt path and pulls the handbrake. He unclips his seatbelt and turns so that his entire body faces Tsukishima, then leans over to push a stray lock out of Tsukishima’s face. His touch lingers just behind the elf’s ears, the pads of his fingers as hot as fresh coals, only to trace leisurely down the vulnerable lines of Tsukishima’s throat. His eyes are hungry, but not for blood or the hunt. A lovely shiver dances down Tsukishima’s spine and curls luxuriously in his gut.

‘I want you,’ Kuroo says bluntly. ‘I want you so bad I could take you right here, in this car. But I won’t,’ he adds, smiling wryly. ‘Because that would be kind of a dick move on a first date.’

Tsukishima’s mouth is somehow both dry and full of electricity. He knows with sudden, frightening certainty that he would let Kuroo take him, right here in this metal contraption, and he would love every last second of it. He wants Kuroo’s thumbs pressing into his hips, wants Kuroo’s lips on his neck, wants to forget all the reasons why they should not - _cannot -_ do this.

He gathers up his courage and what rebellion he has left inside of him that hasn’t been beaten out of him, and forces the words out of his uncooperative lips. ‘I’ve never wanted anything,’ he says, and this is true.

Kuroo’s lips twitch in a sardonic smile, but he doesn’t interrupt.

‘I’ve never wanted anything in my entire life,’ Tsukishima attempts again. ‘But then by the oak and the pine, when- when we kissed, I realized I was lying to myself all along.’ He looks down at his wounded fingers twisting in his lap, then up into Kuroo’s catlike eyes, and exhales in a long, shuddering breath. ‘I did want something. I wanted the same thing my brother had, the thing the Winter Queen murdered him for, because it was like he was the sun and she was the moon and they just orbited each other, and it was perfect. And I felt that, when I kissed you. When you looked at me the way you’re looking at me now - _oh, the way you’re looking at me now,’_ he gasps, because he is really fucking lost now, and all he wants is to feel those hooked teeth pressed against his mouth again.

He has more things to say, but he doesn’t get the chance to say another word, because Kuroo has closed the space between them and is kissing him and kissing him and _kissing him_.

As much as Tsukishima wishes kisses could last forever, now that he knows what it’s like to kiss Kuroo, they must inevitably end, or else lead to something more. But at least one of them realizes that they are necking in a parked car in the middle of the woods like a pair of horny human teenagers, so Kuroo breaks away laughing, pushing Tsukishima away even as their bodies lean towards each other like magnets.

‘I promised dancing,’ Kuroo says, breathless in a way that is electric because _Tsukishima_ was the one who pulled the air out of the goblin’s lungs. ‘You shall have dancing.’ He pulls his jacket back on.

Tsukishima manages a lopsided grin and plucks his glasses from the dashboard. He doesn’t really remember how they got there. ‘Dancing in the middle of the woods? I didn’t know goblins were so Summer-like,’ he teases. He gets out of the car before he can hear Kuroo’s retort.

Tsukishima tips his head back, feeling the fresh forest air sink into his heated skin and cooling his head. This forest does not belong to him the way the forest in the city does, but it feels familiar anyways. The mountain is steep and the creatures that whisper between its trees are a wilder, more playful sort. He can hear birds singing in the trees and the sound of a far-off stream. There are pine cones lining the dirt path, and scatterings of dried pine needles turned a lovely red-tinted brown. Humans have not ruined this place with their iron, and neither have the Courts laid claim to every last inch and made wonder political.

‘I’ll bring you walking here sometime,’ Kuroo says, breaking Tsukishima’s reverie. ‘You’d love it.’

Tsukishima meets Kuroo’s eye from across the top of the car. ‘I’d like that,’ he says with a small smile.

‘I’d do anything to make you happy,’ the wild-haired fairy says. A light breeze picks up through the trees and a spattering of light finds its way past the branches of the evergreen trees, dancing over Kuroo’s yellow eyes. ‘Whatever you want. Wherever you want to go.’

‘Don’t make promises,’ Tsukishima says, but he doesn’t even mean it anymore.

Kuroo smiles strangely. His hand floats near his neck, and suddenly Tsukishima recalls the look on the goblin’s face before he plucked a scale from beneath his chin that night they first kissed. ‘Bit late for that,’ he says cryptically. But before Tsukishima can open his mouth to ask, Kuroo is already heading up the mountain. ‘The entrance isn’t far from here,’ he calls over his shoulder.

Tsukishima doesn’t know if his head is spinning from their kiss, or from the implications of Kuroo’s words - implications he can’t think about yet, not with his wounds so fresh - but all he knows is that the forest and the mountain are waiting.

\--

Lev makes his rounds through the halls of the Fall Court, swimming in his own misery yet entirely powerless to end it. After the brilliance of the revelry, the Court seems abandoned in the cold light of day, and all his fellow knights are wrapped up in their beds happily sleeping their hangover off. His own hangover throbs at his temples and jabs his stomach like hundreds of knives. His disposition is entirely his own fault. He isn’t elf enough to drink mead the way he does, but he does it anyways, because it tastes an awful lot better than the nasty swamp-water flavored stuff his mother’s people prefers. As for taking first shift - he made the rookie mistake of challenging his own captain to a sparring match. Kuroo is all smiles and pleasantries until you drop your guard, then you’re flat on your ass and now as penalty you have to take first shift.

Lev grumbles to himself as he rounds another corner. He’s in a part of the Seelie Court that he’s only set foot in once before, when Yaku dragged him by his collar into the Queen’s armory to pick out a shield or any kind of protective armor, because anyone who uses a sword and only a sword is a fucking idiot and deserves to be pinned to the wall by a spear, _and don’t test me on this one, Lev, or I really will fucking do it this time._ Lev shudders at the memory. Pixies aren’t supposed to be terrifying, but then again, not all pixies come in Yaku-shaped packages.

Most of the Seelie fey never come here to the Queen’s vaults, and so even in the late hours of the afternoon the torchlit halls are silent and abandoned. The rooms are heavily guarded with a nasty array of spells. Indigo lettering is carved into the arches above the doors as a warning of what may happen to all those who enter without permission. Lev stops by each door and pushes them open, as is routine, and peers inside at the treasures of the Fall Queen to check for intruders or any signs of meddling spells. There are piles upon piles of glittering things the Queen has magpied away, silks and gems and crowns from long-dead mortal kings and queens trying to earn her affections or goodwill. There is an entire room dedicated to the plunders of their war against the Unseelie Court, filled with elf-made thorny armor and sweeping cloaks of crowfeather and starless night, as well as thick books of magic stolen from mages who would not pledge themselves to the Fall Court.

Lev lingers by the second-last room, enraptured by its contents. There are dresses made of gossamer and velvet and embroidered with the scenes of a magical forest, hundreds upon hundreds of necklaces and bracelets, leather-bound books piled so high they nearly touch the ceiling, and a large bed that seems to grow out of the floor, with bed posts that branch out and bear so many pink and bronze blossoms. A tall gold-framed painting hangs on one wall, depicting their Seelie Queen holding the Unseelie Queen’s hands. Their faces are full of happiness, and upon their heads they wear matching crowns.

There is something strange and sad about a room dedicated to a marriage that dissolved into centuries of war. As decadent as the dresses and necklaces and gifts are, this room is nothing less than a mausoleum to the Queen’s lost love.

Lev pulls the door shut with a sigh, shaking his head. Elves are too high-strung and too melodramatic to stay married for long. _His_ parents have been together nearly seventy years now, and nobody thought an ogre and an elf would work - but look how happy they are! No royal duties, no complicated bloodlines.

‘I’ll never get involved with an elf,’ he tells himself with a firm nod.

‘Yeah, elves suck,’ says a light voice.

Lev whips around, brandishing his sword. By the last door of the Queen’s vaults, in the flickering light of a wall torch, stands a girl with a neat, blond bob, dressed in a white and blue dress. The wall above her is dripping with water - a leak somewhere up in the feasting halls, perhaps - forming a small puddle at the girl’s bare feet. Lev can sense the glamor on her, heavy and candy-sweet, and he raises his sword higher.

‘Stop right there and declare yourself,’ he warns.

She laughs, and suddenly he can see a crack through her glamor, revealing sharp jagged teeth and milk-white eyes. ‘You’re fun,’ she grins at him. ‘But you’re late to the party.’

The puddle of gathering water seeps beneath the cracks of the door, flooding into the room. The girl’s grin spreads impossibly wider. She steps towards the locked door. Lev strikes, a flash of motion and the glint of a blade whipping through the air, but the girl is faster. One moment she stands in front of him, the next, she slips down into the shallow water of the puddle as though it has suddenly turned into a lake and is _gone._ Lev’s sword strikes the wall, clanging harmlessly. He looks up at the water flowing steadily down from the ceiling, then down at where the puddle grows and spreads until there is water flowing up and down the hallways.

Past the heavy wood of the door, Lev hears light girlish laughter.

In a fit of panic, Lev yanks open the door, revealing the last of the Queen’s treasures: an ancient loom made of strange white metal, standing in the middle of a black room. The girl stands beside it, her hand stroking one of its many beams, nearly purring with appreciation. As Lev rushes in, his steps splash in near ankle-deep water. The girl turns around, her skin shimmering with so many scales.

‘Stop right there!’ he shouts, charging at her with his sword drawn.

‘Bye now,’ the creature grins, and then she and the loom melt through the cavern floor.

Lev is left standing, mouth agape, as the siren’s laughter rings through the now-empty chamber like the tinkling of tiny bells. Kuroo is going to _kill_ him.

\--

The entrance to the halls of the Goblin King is nothing but a crack between two leaning boulders, too thin for any mortal to slip past, but Kuroo pushes at the moss-covered rock and the crack widens into a narrow passage. The first few steps through the passage are in pitch darkness - the crack whispers back to its original size just as Tsukishima steps out of the forest and into the mountain - however a soft blue bioluminescence begins to glow all around them. As they move deeper into the tunnel, Tsukishima starts to see the source of the blue light clearly: tiny bat-like creatures with pincer-like teeth and fluffy little bodies, with iridescent dragonfly-wings and tiny little glowing mushrooms sprouting from their backs. He stares at them, fascinated.

‘Cave fairies,’ Kuroo explains, his expression soft with fondness.

‘They’re beautiful,’ Tsukishima breathes. The creatures chitter around him, as though they understand the compliment.

Kuroo takes his hand and leads him deeper. Together they walk for what seems like and endless stretch of rock and blue light, until finally the small passage opens up into an enormous chamber. The cavern is lit with sparkling golden lights that blind Tsukishima for a good few moments, and he is suddenly thankful for Kuroo’s hand firm around his or he would surely stumble over the uneven cavern floor.

The blinding brightness fades to reveal an enormous tree growing upside down, its roots firmly rooted into the dark rock of the cavern ceiling. Its bark is flinty grey, but its leaves are shimmering gold and its dark, purple fruit shimmers as though hundreds of gold pieces swim within. Two small goblin children gather the fruit into a large basket, joking and laughing as their yellow cat’s eyes gleam. They catch sight of Kuroo and Tsukishima and the smaller goblin waves with a bright smile full of hooked teeth.

‘Tetsurou,’ she greets. ‘Who’s the surface-dweller?’

‘My boyfriend,’ Kuroo replies, barely wincing when Tsukishima elbows him hard in the ribs. ‘I’m taking him dancing.’

‘Boring,’ drawls the other child, rolling her eyes. She plucks another fruit from the upside-down tree and tosses it at Tsukishima, who catches it out of reflex. ‘It’ll fix your finger,’ she tells him.

Tsukishima glances at Kuroo before taking a bite out of the fruit. It swirls over his tongue, brilliant and decadent and nothing like the fruit in the Court of the Sun, nothing like anything he has ever tasted except maybe -

‘This is what you make the wine out of,’ he whispers to Kuroo.

‘Yep,’ Kuroo grins.

It does, in fact, fix his finger, and Kuroo helps him pull apart the splint on his finger and take off the hastily wrapped gauze. They wave goodbye to the goblin children and pass through the cavern, moving through a honeycomb series of caverns full of the gold-leafed, upside-down trees and more goblin children picking fruit and gathering them in baskets. It seems as though everyone knows Kuroo by name, and when Tsukishima gives him a questioning look, Kuroo explains that he used to pick fruit too, until he started show-fighting for money.

‘Show-fighting?’ Tsukishima asks with a frown.

Kuroo flashes him a wicked grin that shoots electricity into Tsukishima’s toes. ‘You’ll see.’

Past the many small caverns, they move through a cavern that stretches up forever into the dark. A narrow footbridge hangs between the cavern entrances, lit only by glowing golden vines that trace through the railing of the hanging bridge, revealing a thundering waterfall that borders so close to the bridge that Tsukishima can feel the spray from the curtain of water that plunges dizzying depths beneath before disappearing in the darkness. He _knows_ there is a river far beneath them, _knows_ that it carries some of the magic of the mountain and runs deep within the mountain range like a vein - and even with all this magic drowning them, the goblins haven’t done a single thing with it except collect fruit and make wine. It reminds him of the way things used to be, of the way things were when his parents first fell in love thousands and thousands of years ago.

But Tsukishima has no time to wallow in his sorrow, for already Kuroo is coaxing him through to a long series of hallways, carved with intricate scenes of horned goblins dancing and drinking as they watch two of their kind fight with drawn, curved swords on a raised platform. There are a few open doors, through which Tsukishima glimpses goblins sharpening swords while laughing and joking in a strange, gravelly language, dressed in plain block colors of purple, yellow, and grey as though separating them into teams. One particularly scarred goblin with _veritable fangs_ hanging over his lips catches sight of Kuroo through the open door and barks out a greeting, shaking a heavy hammer in greeting and narrowly missing another goblin’s face in the process.

Kuroo responds in a similar rush of rolling sounds, his voice deep and rough in a way that turns Tsukishima’s cheeks pink.

‘Who was that?’ Tsukishima asks as they move on through the hallway.

‘Oh, my old fight-mate,’ Kuroo replies. His voice still carries the gravel from his Kin’s language, and it does nothing to abate Tsukishima’s embarrassing blush. ‘I used to win all the time. He still owes me three jugs of mead, but he’s a broke-ass bitch.’

‘You won against _that_?’ Tsukishima hissed, thinking of the goblin’s near troll-like frame.

‘Oh, come on,’ Kuroo laughs, slipping his around Tsukishima’s shoulders and pulling him close. ‘Tell me you couldn’t.’

‘Well, not since-’ he bites off his response, looking down at his arms and knowing that there are things that he hasn’t told Kuroo yet, things he hasn’t been honest about. Here he is, peering into all of Kuroo’s secrets and his entire past, and he can’t find the words or the strength to tell Kuroo how worthless he is, how useless, how _fucking broken_ he is. He wishes he had somewhere beautiful and wondrous to show Kuroo, but all he has are ashes, death, and empty halls and broken thrones.

When he finds the courage to look up into the wild-haired fairy’s eyes, he finds himself trapped in Kuroo’s searching gaze. ‘Whatever it is you’ve been carrying around,’ Kuroo says, low and gentle and sweet, ‘you can put it down now.’ And then he pulls Tsukishima against the walls and presses a soft kiss onto his lips, and another onto his bruised neck, and another, and another, until Tsukishima can’t think of anything but the sweet taste of goblin-fruit in his mouth and Kuroo’s strong arms pressing against his lower back.

It takes a while for them to untangle again, aided by the whoops and jeers of the goblin fighters passing them in the hallway. ‘Come watch us fight, lovebirds!’ the troll-sized goblin shouts, shaking his hammer above his head.

‘You mean come watch you lose,’ Kuroo yells at his old fight-mate’s retreating back. He turns back to pull at Tsukishima’s hand and dip his head so that his lips brush the conch of Tsukishima’s ear. ‘Come,’ he murmurs. ‘Let me show you what we goblins do for a good time.’

Tsukishima is torn between listening to Kuroo’s voice drag whorls of want down his spine and pushing the wild-haired fairy back against the wall, so he forgets himself in kisses again. He settles instead for a crooked smile and murmuring in a voice he knows is velvet-sweet: ‘I thought you already showed me what goblins do for a good time.’

It’s enough to stop Kuroo in his tracks, his mouth hanging open. Tsukishima walks ahead without him, his laughter bouncing off the stone walls. Even if this is doomed to last only moments, even if he will only get a sliver of joy in his dark, cursed life, then by the Moon and the Sun and all the Kings and Queens who came before him, he will have this bright moment far away from the clashing Courts, far away from his family and those who murdered them.

Because he is standing here in the halls of the Goblin King, and Kuroo is looking at him like he is the night sky and all the stars too, and it rings in his veins like rivers of goblin wine.

Here, he is invincible.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (There’s foreshadowing in this chapter hey hey hey. Spot the foreshadowing.) Guys this chapter took for fucking ever, there was just so much I wanted to write and I’ve been in a depression pit nearly as deep as the halls of the Goblin King. Bit personal but I didn’t pass the New York Bar and I kind of hate myself BUT HEY at least I write fantastic homoerotic fiction about volleyball players amirite? (wait till ch 13 for the homoerotic part)  
> Yachi is horribly OOC here. Pls don’t kill me.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back! After much hiatus and very little inspiration, thanks to my personal Bumblebee I've now written this.  
> Obviously forgive me if I sometimes write anyone OOC. I welcome any and all criticisms.


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